I noticed thirteen "inline"s in coreutils/src/sort.c. Just for fun, I removed them all. In ten cases, removing "inline" made no difference to the generated machine code on my platform (RHEL 5, x86-64, GCC 4.1.2, compiled with the typical gcc -O2). In the three sort.c functions that were exceptions (queue_insert, write_unique, check_insert), removing "inline" made the overall code a tad shorter with no measurable change to CPU performance.
Is there a reason those "inline"s are in there? If not, I'm inclined to remove them. I can see a use for "static inline" in .h files, as this asks the compiler not to warn about unused functions, but as far as I know, it's typically not necessary to use "inline" in .c files these days, as the compiler is typically smart enough. I've checked this only for coreutils/src/sort.c but perhaps the same argument applies to other source files in coreutils or other GNU apps, so I'll CC: this to bug-gnulib for more-general comment.
