Re: strategy for .h files?

[John W. Eaton]

On 05/02/2017 04:18 PM, Rik wrote:

> Summarizing, Octave's aim is for lightweight header files.

Generally, yes.  But I would also add that inline function definitions 
are fine, provided that they are relatively small and don't require 
pulling in system- or feature-dependent header files.

Without inlining things like forwarding through the rep pointer (all the 
"rep->foo ()" calls in octave_value, for example) I think the 
performance would really suffer.  In the future we might be able to 
avoid using reference counting for some of these core classes (like 
octave_value) or rely more heavily on link-time optimization, but until 
then, we need function inlining and for that to work we have to provide 
many function definitions in the header files.

jwe