[Python-Dev] C99

[Guido van Rossum]

On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 6:25 AM, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 6, 2016, at 07:23, Sturla Molden wrote:
>> Ok, but if third-party developers shall be free to use a C89 compiler for
>> their own code, we cannot have C99 in the include files. Otherwise the
>> include files will taint the C89 purity of their source code.
>>
>> Personally I don't think we need to worry about compilers that don't
>> implement C99 features like inline functions in C. How long have the
>> Linux
>> kernel used inline functions instead of macros? 20 years or more?
>
> Using inline functions instead of macros doesn't have to mean anything
> but a performance hit on platforms that don't support them, since the
> inline keyword, or some other identifier, could be defined to expand to
> an empty token sequence on platforms that do not support it. It's much
> lower impact on the source code than some other C99 features.

That could be a major performance impact.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)