pragma(inline, true) not very useful in its current state?

Hi all, I'm not even referring to the multitude of restrictions in the DMD frontend inliner here. When looking into the remaining 2.068 test failures for LDC, I was surprised to find out that DMD only honors pragma(inline, true) when -inline is actually passed on the command line. This seems to be completely against what many people I spoke to (including, of course, our resident Mr. Why-Can't-D-Be-More-Like-C++, Manu Evans) cite as one of the primary use cases for the feature, which is to force inlining of certain functions even in debug builds. What were the reasons behind this decision? — David

On Thursday, 24 September 2015 at 15:47:45 UTC, David Nadlinger wrote: > Hi all, > > I'm not even referring to the multitude of restrictions in the DMD frontend inliner here. When looking into the remaining 2.068 test failures for LDC, I was surprised to find out that DMD only honors pragma(inline, true) when -inline is actually passed on the command line. > > This seems to be completely against what many people I spoke to (including, of course, our resident Mr. Why-Can't-D-Be-More-Like-C++, Manu Evans) cite as one of the primary use cases for the feature, which is to force inlining of certain functions even in debug builds. > > What were the reasons behind this decision? > > — David Can't ldc and gdc just be sane and let dmd carry on being (ahem) odd.

On Thursday, 24 September 2015 at 15:47:45 UTC, David Nadlinger wrote: > which is to force inlining of certain functions even in debug builds. I don't understand what the problem is. Just pass -inline in your debug build.

On 9/24/2015 8:47 AM, David Nadlinger wrote: > What were the reasons behind this decision? The trouble is the compiler does inlining as a top down traversal, whereas forcing inline with no -inline would be a bottom up thing. The compiler could always do the top down traversal, but it would make compilations slower, whether any force inlines exist or not.

On 25 September 2015 at 04:10, John Colvin via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote: > On Thursday, 24 September 2015 at 15:47:45 UTC, David Nadlinger wrote: >> >> Hi all, >> >> I'm not even referring to the multitude of restrictions in the DMD frontend inliner here. When looking into the remaining 2.068 test failures for LDC, I was surprised to find out that DMD only honors pragma(inline, true) when -inline is actually passed on the command line. >> >> This seems to be completely against what many people I spoke to (including, of course, our resident Mr. Why-Can't-D-Be-More-Like-C++, Manu Evans) cite as one of the primary use cases for the feature, which is to force inlining of certain functions even in debug builds. >> >> What were the reasons behind this decision? >> >> — David > > > Can't ldc and gdc just be sane and let dmd carry on being (ahem) odd. This. Please.

On 25 September 2015 at 01:47, David Nadlinger via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote: > Hi all, > > [...] > our resident Mr. Why-Can't-D-Be-More-Like-C++, Manu Evans Bah, I'm not sure what this means. If you mean I advocate for things that are perfect how they are in C/C++, precedented by decades of use and millions of developers, remaining as people expect them to be... then yes. C++ didn't get *everything* wrong, otherwise D wouldn't be so much like C++ to begin with. __forceinline in C++ is exactly what people want here. The behaviour is useful, and well understood; compiler will always inline if possible, and warn if it can't. There's nothing wrong with C++ in this case, and I wish D would just be the same. I'm happy for DMD to not inline anything in debug if it's technically impossible due to compiler architecture, but it's not useful as an error, that just forces you to remove it from your code if you want it to compile. We don't have any tools in D at all to control whether attributes like inline should or shouldn't be present between different build configurations. We _really_ need attribute aliasing in some form, especially since LDC/GDC have compiler-specific attributes that DMD doesn't recognise.