Don't forget "inline" and "register"

The conventional wisdom these days is that compilers are, like the Great and Powerful Oz, all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-optimizing. Instead of foolishly trying to make your code faster, you, mere mortal developer, should simply choose good algorithms, use standard libraries, and specify "-O3" to gcc.

The other day, on a lark, I decided to declare one of my functions "inline", since it was used in an inner loop of my main routine, and I also prefixed some of its local variables with the "register" keyword (I made these edits separately, so I could see whether either made a difference). My thought was, well, the compiler's probably chopping this code up six ways past Sunday, but, what the hell?, can't hurt to try. In return for the 5 minutes of time I spent doing this (including compiling and testing), I received a 20% performance improvement.

I'd already been specifying "-O3". I'd removed all the heap allocations. The code was fast enough that Shark couldn't find any obvious hot-spots. 20%.

So, after you write well-factored code, and choose good algorithms, and use profiling to find the hot-spots, and wonder where the next improvement will come from... remember your friends, "inline" and "register" and take 5 minutes to see whether they improve things for you.