Re: Changes in GC and in pure space (was: [Emacs-diffs] master 5d4dd55: Fix lifetime error in previous patch)

[Daniel Colascione]

>> From: Paul Eggert <address@hidden>
>> Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2019 23:05:00 -0700
>> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>, Daniel Colascione <address@hidden>,
>>  address@hidden
>>
>> In buffer.h, prefer inline functions to function-like macros
>> when either will do.  This helps avoid confusion about how
>> many times an arg is evaluated.  On my platform, this patch
>> improves performance of ‘make compile-always’ by 5.7%.
>
> How portable is "INLINE" (and if it's portable enough, why do we use a
> macro for it)?  If some platforms don't support it, and these macros
> become non-inline functions, those platforms will be punished by this
> kind of changes.
>
> I FWIW, personally find the issue of confusion about macro argument
> evaluation to be a very weak one as justification to get rid of macros
> that needed approximately zero maintenance for many years.  But that's
> me.

Using a bare 'inline' is fine these days. We already require C99. Macros
are awkward in many ways, e.g., being invisible in debugger traces. These
days, there are a lot of reasons to avoid macros and very few reasons to
use them, so let's just switch to inline functions like the rest of the
world has.