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The concept of the virtual function solves the following problem: In object-oriented programming, when a derived class inherits from a base class, an object of the derived class may be referred to via a pointer or reference of the base class type instead of the derived class type.
A virtual call requires at least an extra indexed dereference and sometimes a "fixup" addition, compared to a non-virtual call, which is simply a jump to a compiled-in pointer. Therefore, calling virtual functions is inherently slower than calling non-virtual functions.
The default form of dispatch is static. To get dynamic dispatch the programmer must declare a method as virtual. C++ compilers typically implement dynamic dispatch with a data structure called a virtual function table (vtable) that defines the name-to-implementation mapping for a given class as a set of member function pointers. This is purely ...
In C#, class methods, indexers, properties and events can all be overridden. Non-virtual or static methods cannot be overridden. The overridden base method must be virtual, abstract, or override. In addition to the modifiers that are used for method overriding, C# allows the hiding of an inherited property or method.
An interface as in C# and Java can be defined in C++ as a class containing only pure virtual functions, often known as an abstract base class or "ABC". The member functions of such an abstract base class are normally explicitly defined in the derived class, not inherited implicitly.
Some languages require that method be specifically declared as virtual (e.g. C++), and in others, all methods are virtual (e.g. Java). An invocation of a non-virtual method will always be statically dispatched (i.e. the address of the function call is determined at compile-time).
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of objects, [1] which can contain data and code: data in the form of fields (often known as attributes or properties), and code in the form of procedures (often known as methods).
The problem is that, while virtual functions are dispatched dynamically in C++, function overloading is done statically. The problem described above can be resolved by simulating double dispatch, for example by using a visitor pattern. Suppose the existing code is extended so that both SpaceShip and ApolloSpacecraft are given the function