John Carmack is a major games developer involved with DOOM, Quake and many other titles. Recently some past things he wrote were published and its interesting particular about inlined code.

You can read the piece here, but I’ll just copy a little bit out. Which of these three coding styles do you prefer?

------- style A:
 
void MinorFunction1( void ) {
}
 
void MinorFunction2( void ) {
}
 
void MinorFunction3( void ) {
}
 
void MajorFunction( void ) {
        MinorFunction1();
        MinorFunction2();
        MinorFunction3();
}
 
--------- style B:
 void MajorFunction( void ) {
        MinorFunction1();
        MinorFunction2();
        MinorFunction3();
}
 
void MinorFunction1( void ) {
}
 
void MinorFunction2( void ) {
}
 
void MinorFunction3( void ) {
}
  
---------- style C:
 
void MajorFunction( void ) {
        // MinorFunction1
 
        // MinorFunction2
 
        // MinorFunction3
 
}

If you look at the source of Asteroids, you’d probably notice I’m more of an A or B person. I do like readability. Though if you looked back at the assembler code I wrote 30 odd years ago, it was not very modular. I used functions very rarely back then. In those days, you had to do a lot of tricks like unrolling loops to get that extra bit of performance. Now, it’s not quite as important and I’m happy to make it readable.