Re: asm/unistd.h

["David S. Miller" <davem@redhat.com>]

Steve Grubb writes:
 > It would seem to me that after hearing how the macros are used in practice,
 > wouldn't turning them into inline functions be an improvement? This is
 > something gcc supports, it accomplishes the same thing, and has the added
 > advantage of type checking.
 > http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-2.95.3/gcc_4.html#SEC92

Two reasons:

1) Sometimes I don't want any type checking because it would create
   the necessity of adding a new include to a file --> a circular
   dependency to resolve.  Macros hide the types except in the
   cases where they are actually invoked :-)

2) Historically GCC was very bad with code generation with inline
   functions, so at that time the GCC manual statement "inline
   functions are just like a macro" was technically false :-)

   Yes, I know this is much different in today's gcc tree, but
   there hasn't been a gcc release in over 2 years so...

Later,
David S. Miller
davem@redhat.com