When/why did function calls get cheap?

My understanding is that in Olden Times, Real Programmers avoided
using lots of small functions because the overhead of a function call
was considered high. But then, somewhere along the way, the compiler
writers got clever and made function calls cheap so now nobody worries
about it. Is that more or less correct? And if so, what happened to
make function calls cheap. It seems that there's a non-trivial amount
of work to do to set up a stack frame, etc. compared to just
continuing along in a straight line processing instructions that do
the actual work--are there deep black-magic optimizations or did the
relative costs of something change or something else entirely?


-Peter
--
Peter Seibel
peter@javamonkey.com
[Computers got faster, compilers and programmers learned how to expand
small (and sometimes not so small) functions in-line. -John]

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