I've been doing a lot of "differential debugging" on the Lua codebase lately. There's something going off the rails in a part of Teliva that I don't understand yet. I try to make my change in a temporary copy of the unmodified Lua sources and step through to see, what is the control flow supposed to look like? Then I compare with what's happening in Teliva. Where does it go off the rails? Super useful to have working software that is so easy to compile.

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I've been programming in C++ for a long time, and just ran into a very surprising situation in C.

$ cat x.c
inline int foo(void) {
  return 42;
}

int main(void) {
  return foo();
}

$ gcc -c x.c
$ gcc x.o
undefined reference to 'foo'

$ gcc -O1 -c x.c
$ gcc x.o
# no error

If you compile without optimizations, the `inline` keyword does nothing -- but the function is still excluded from the object file.

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