Re: When/why did function calls get cheap?

"Peter Seibel" <peter@javamonkey.com> wrote in message
> 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? ...


If this is homework, please reference the newsgroup.


As far as I know, the main thing that changed is computers got faster.


A calling convention that depends on allocating/deallocating memory
has the cost of memory allocation, which can be considerable.


There are comparisons of the speed of Java relative to C++.
Object-oriented programming has a relatively larger cost because it
tends to require more allocation/deallocation relative to non-OO
programming.


-- glen

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