Itanium® Architecture for Programmers: Understanding 64-Bit Processors and EPIC Principles

11.4. Inline Optimizations

In Chapters 7 and 10 you had opportunities to observe the amount of overhead involved with function and procedure calls. The Itanium calling standards are actually quite modest in their impact as compared to some earlier architectures and programming environments. Nevertheless, the system software for high-performance architectures commonly provides options for reducing call overhead.

We have previously alluded to moving functions inline—i.e., copying the body of the function or procedure right into the instruction stream of the caller rather than setting up a call. The same function can be replicated several times. While doing that does increase the overall size of the machine-language program, virtual paging by the ...