Re: [PATCH] git-compat-util: Avoid strcasecmp() being inlined

On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 8:20 PM, Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

quoted

I wonder if GCC has changed it's behaviour to more closely match C99.
Clang as a compatibility article about this sort of issue:

    http://clang.llvm.org/compatibility.html#inline

Interesting.  The ways the page suggests as fixes are

 - change it to a "statis inline";
 - remove "inline" from the definition;
 - provide an external (non-inline) def somewhere else;
 - compile with gnu899 dialect.

Right, option 3 seems perfectly reasonable to me, as we must be prepared
to cope with a decision not to inline the function, and there has to be
_some_ linked implementation. But shouldn't libc be providing an
external, linkable strcasecmp in this case?

MinGW / GCC is not linking against libc, but against MSVCRT, Visual
Studio's C runtime. And in fact MSVCRT has a non-inline implementation
of a "case-insensitive string comparison for up to the first n
characters"; it just happens to be called "_strnicmp", not
"strncasecmp". Which is why I still think just having a "#define
strncasecmp _strnicmp" is the most elegant solution to the problem.
And that's exactly what defining __NO_INLINE__ does. Granted, defining
__NO_INLINE__ in the scope of string.h will also add a "#define
strcasecmp _stricmp"; but despite it's name, defining __NO_INLINE__
does not imply a performance hit due to functions not being inlined
because it's just the "strncasecmp" wrapper around "_strnicmp" that's
being inlined, not "_strnicmp" itself.

-- 
Sebastian Schuberth