I think Visual Studio at the time could inline functions - VS 6.0 from 1998 definitely could: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rbd/doc/optcode.htm http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~

I think Visual Studio at the time could inline functions - VS 6.0 from 1998 definitely could: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rbd/doc/optcode.htm http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rbd/doc/optcode.htm. Especially if explicitly marked 'inline', then it would happen at lower optimization settings. I wonder if devs at the time were skeptical of relying on automatic optimizations, when a few years earlier doing it themselves was the only option. I could definitely see myself falling into that mindset.