Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Inlining Constant Functions

Functions prototyped with (), meaning that they take no arguments at all, are parsed like the time built-in. More interestingly, the compiler treats such functions as potential candidates for inlining. If the result of that function, after Perl’s optimization and constant-folding pass, is either a constant or a lexically scoped scalar with no other references, then that value will be used in place of calls to that function. Calls made using &NAME are never inlined, however, just as they are not subject to any other prototype effects. (See the constant pragma in Chapter 29 for an easy way to declare such constants.)

Both versions of these functions to compute π will be inlined by the compiler:

sub pi ()           { 3.14159 }             # Not exact, but close
sub PI ()           { 4 * atan2(1, 1) }     # As good as it gets

In fact, all of the following functions are inlined because Perl can determine everything at compile time:

sub FLAG_FOO ()     { 1 << 8 }
sub FLAG_BAR ()     { 1 << 9 }
sub FLAG_MASK ()    { FLAG_FOO | FLAG_BAR }

sub OPT_GLARCH ()   { (0x1B58 & FLAG_MASK) == 0 }
sub GLARCH_VAL ()   {
    if (OPT_GLARCH) { return 23 }
    else            { return 42 }
}

sub N () { int(GLARCH_VAL) / 3 }
BEGIN {                 # compiler runs this block at compile time
    my $prod = 1;       # persistent, private variable
    for (1 .. N) { $prod *= $_ }
    sub NFACT () { $prod }
}

In the last example, the NFACT function is inlined because it has a void prototype and the variable it returns is not changed by that function; furthermore, it can’t be changed by ...