Inlining

Small compiled methods that fit into a call site can easily be inlined using the code patching mechanism. The JVM inlines a method by patching the method body into a call site and pads the remaining space with nops. Interestingly, inlining in this manner allows us to inline a method after all call sites to it have been compiled. This kind of inlining typically happens because inlining at the time we compile the caller is not always possible, usually because of class initialization constraints. More sophisticated techniques for inlining can be found in [12].