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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.
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
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 ...
To elaborate on the above example, consider a base class with no virtual functions. Whenever the base class calls another member function, it will always call its own base class functions. When we derive a class from this base class, we inherit all the member variables and member functions that were not overridden (no constructors or destructors).
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.
In object-oriented programming, the factory method pattern is a design pattern that uses factory methods to deal with the problem of creating objects without having to specify their exact classes. Rather than by calling a constructor , this is accomplished by invoking a factory method to create an object.
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 ...