Fair enough. However, from the research I was doing, there is incredibly little to zero chance this will have any impact on the compiler or performance. The only thing this does is change the one-definition rule so that multiple translation units are allowed to have the same implementation of this function.

Here's a good answer :http://stackoverflow.com/a/1932371/1128820

I guess here since it's so small it's OK to inline, but in terms of performance it may or may not have much of an impact.