On Sunday, 23 February 2014 at 21:53:43 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
I'm aware of that, but once you add the:version(BadCompiler) { } else pragma(inline, true);things will never get better for BadCompiler. And besides, that line looks awful.
If I need to support multiple compilers and if one of them is not good enough, I would first try to figure out which statement causes it to fail, if left with no other alternatives: Manually inline it in the common path for all compilers, _not_ create version blocks.
Inspecting asm output doesn't scale well to huge projects. Imagine simply updating the existing codebase to use a new compiler version.
Based on my experience, even if we are profiling and benchmarking a lot and have many performance based KPI:s, they will still never be as fine-grained as the functional test coverage.
Also not forgetting, some performance issues may only be detected in live usage scenarios on the other side of the earth as the developers doesn't even have access to the needed environment(only imperfect simulations), in those scenarios you are quite grateful for every static compilation error/warning you can get...
You are right in that there is nothing special about inlining, but I'd rather add warnings for all other failed optimisation opportunities than not to warn about failed inlining. RVCT for instance has --diag_warning=optimizations, which gives many helpful hints, such as alias issues: please add "restrict", or possible alignment issues etc.
