[nmz]

its also a level of indirection... It's sad but functions often slow performance down. but this depends on the language.

[marginalia_nu]

Can't be many languages where that matters in 2022. Auto-inlining of short functions was a thing in the 1990s.

[extasia]

This may be true for compiled langs. In interpreted langs this is not the case. Function calls in Python for example are notoriously expensive.

[nmz]

Beat me to it. Yes, I ran a quick benchmark[0] and not running a function always wins. now, one may argue that you are running a call, but if the interpreter was smart it would convert the small function calls to just a noops.

[0]: https://github.com/Nomarian/crapbenchmarks/tree/main/call

  Summary
  'Perl/nofunc' ran
    1.63 ± 0.30 times faster than 'Perl/func'
    1.73 ± 0.34 times faster than 'Lua/nofunc'
    2.11 ± 0.55 times faster than 'Lua/func'
    9.37 ± 1.62 times faster than 'Python/nofunc'
   12.18 ± 1.90 times faster than 'TCL/nofunc'
   16.02 ± 2.58 times faster than 'TCL/func'
   18.64 ± 3.02 times faster than 'Python/func'

[dTal]

If you're hand-wringing about the performance impact of function calls, Python is probably the wrong choice anyway.