On Mon, 7 Oct 2024, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc-help wrote:
I think the question is about the 'const' in the non-defining
declaration of the function, i.e. "the prototype" in C
terminology. It's meaningful on the function definition, but adding
or removing it on the decl in the header makes no difference to
anything.
Are there any circumstances where knowing that the arg is const means
that the value does not need to be copied/saved before calling the
function ? One possible case is a wrapper function which immediately
calls the wrapped function, then does something with the arguments ?
Even with call by value, I imagine that there are optimizations that
can be done when the compiler writes a function call knowing that
arguments are declared const.
--
Andrew C. Aitchison Kendal, UK
andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
