8 Inlining and IPA

This chapter presents additional information about the KAP command qualifiers and inline directives used to inline subroutines and functions, or to perform Interprocedural Analysis (IPA).

Inlining is the process of replacing a subroutine CALL or function reference with the text of the routine. This eliminates the overhead of the call, and can assist other optimizations by making relationships between arguments, returned values, and the surrounding code easier to find.

IPA is the process of inspecting called subroutines and functions for information on relationships between arguments, returned values, and global data. IPA can provide many of the benefits of inlining, but without replacing the CALL or function reference.

The rest of this chapter covers the inlining and IPA command qualifiers and directives, related command qualifiers, examples of their use, and information about program constructs that inhibit inlining. Inlining and IPA are symmetrical from the command-line standpoint - there are parallel sets of commands and directives for them. In many places in this chapter the term inlining applies to both inlining and IPA.

Previous Page | Next Page | Contents | Index |
Command-Line Qualifiers