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In object-oriented programming such as is often used in C++ and Object Pascal, a virtual function or virtual method is an inheritable and overridable function or method that is dispatched dynamically.
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.
The "vtable" method developed in C++ and other early OO languages (where each class has an array of function pointers corresponding to that class's virtual functions) is nearly as fast as a static method call, requiring O(1) overhead and only one additional memory lookup even in the un-optimized case. However, the vtable method uses the ...
Virtual class; Virtual function (also called virtual method) Virtual function pointer (also called virtual method pointer) Virtual inheritance (Object Oriented Programming) Virtual method table (also called vtable, virtual function table or virtual method table) Viscosity (programming) Void type
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).
A class containing a pure virtual function is called an abstract class. Objects cannot be created from an abstract class; they can only be derived from. Any derived class inherits the virtual function as pure and must provide a non-pure definition of it (and all other pure virtual functions) before objects of the derived class can be created.