Quote:Originally posted by David
What is fmadds?

A PowerPC instruction that multiplies two floating point numbers and adds a third. It's faster than doing a fmuls (multiply) and fadds (add) separately

Quote:Is it slower to have a static float and use it every time the function is called or make a local float?

In theory a good compiler would do whatever is fastest in both cases. If you are going to use a local, make sure it's const (though a good compiler with auto-const it).

Quote:What does inlining a function do?

There's non-trivial overhead involved in any function call. Inlining avoids this by "inlining" the code of the function into the caller. It also allows the compiler to make optimizations in the called function specific to the call being replaced (such as replacing variables with constants).

Quote:Originally posted by inio
In theory a good compiler would do whatever is fastest in both cases. If you are going to use a local, make sure it's const (though a good compiler with auto-const it).

In practice, a static variable will (almost?) always be slower, since the compiler will feel compelled to write to memory whatever value the variable has at the end of the function, where the value of a local can just be discarded. Yes, in theory a good compiler could tell whether writing to memory was necessary or not, but since there's an explicit language flag 'static' to do that, I'd guess it's not a common optimization for compilers to perform. GCC certainly generates more code for the static case than the non-static.

Quote:Originally posted by OneSadCookie
In practice, a static variable will (almost?) always be slower, since the compiler will feel compelled to write to memory whatever value the variable has at the end of the function, where the value of a local can just be discarded. Yes, in theory a good compiler could tell whether writing to memory was necessary or not, but since there's an explicit language flag 'static' to do that, I'd guess it's not a common optimization for compilers to perform. GCC certainly generates more code for the static case than the non-static.

Oops, I misread static as const. And I didn't read his question closely enough

I thought the question was:
vs. if you use foo multiple times in a function, these will be faster than inlining the value in each statement. However, these should generate equivelant code as all FP constants have to be stored as const globals (vs. small integer constants, which can be stored in the instruction stream).