I want to make several constants in C with #define to speed up computation. Two of them are not simply trivial numbers, where one is a right shift, the other is a power. math.h in C gives the function pow() for doubles, whereas I need powers for integers, so I wrote my own function, ipow, so I wouldn't need to be casting everytime.

My question is this: One of the #define constants I want to make is a power, say ipow(M, T), where M and T were also #define constants. ipow is a function in the actual code, so this actually seems to slows things down when I run the code (is it running ipow everytime the constant is mentioned?). However, when I ues the built in pow function and just do (int)pow(M,T), the code is sped up. I'm confused as to why this is, since the ipow and pow functions are just as fast.

On a more general note, can I define constants using #define using functions inside the actual code? The above example has me confused on whether this speeds things up or actually slows things down.