[Maxatar]

Dynamic linking will inhibit inlining entirely, and so yes qsort does not in practice get inlined if libc is dynamically linked. However, compilers can inline definitions across translation units without much of any issue if whole program optimization is enabled.

The use of function pointers doesn't have much of an impact on inlining. If the argument supplied as a parameter is known at compile time then the compiler has no issue performing the direct substitution whether it's a function pointer or otherwise.