The fundamental difference between a macro and an inline function is that they are handled in different phases of binary creation. A macro is expanded during pre-processing stage by the “cpp” command. The “cpp” command is the C preprocessor. On the other hand, the inline functions are handled by the actual compiler “gcc“.

As the preprocessor is less intelligent, it does blind code replacements wherever it finds usage of a macro. A function described in a macro form doesn’t look nice in terms of code readability. Also arguments taken by a macro do not carry their type and often cause compilation More >