Description
In case the compile-time impact is high, how does this change compare to enabling LTO in the build? What I remember from Tofino days, we had rather significant speedup by enabling LTO, presumably exactly because it allows inlining more functions. The advantage is that LTO can be enabled only for release builds so normal development build speeds are not affected.
On a slight tangent, there was an idea of speeding up compilation by using PCH (precompiled header in GCC/clang) for ir-generated.h. As far as I know, it was never tried and it was not completely clear if it was doable, but maybe it is worth investigating for the compilation speed (I don't think C++ modules will "save" us in in any reasonably close future giving their current state and more importantly the tool support state and requirements for P4C build).
Originally posted by @vlstill in #5030 (comment)