Re: Virtual method inlining

From:
David Brown <david@westcontrol.removethisbit.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:38:23 +0100
Message-ID:
<7K2dnWale4jQpgfNnZ2dnUVZ8gCdnZ2d@lyse.net>
On 07/11/2012 11:33, 1 2 wrote:

On Nov 7, 5:06 am, Ian Collins <ian-n...@hotmail.com> wrote:

On 11/07/12 22:49, s0s...@gmail.com wrote:

I've heard of virtual method inlining in Java, and I'd like to know if the same is possible in C++. If so, in which cases is it applicable?

I ask because I'm learning Direct3D, and I want to know if it's OK to use virtual methods for rendering operations that are performed at every frame, or if I should give up virtual methods and just do all rendering in a single file, of course at the expense of loss of abstraction.


** Please wrap your lines to something readable! **

The compiler may inline a virtual method if it knows the type of an
object. In the following trivial example, f.f() will probably be
inlined because the compiler knows that b is a B.

struct A
{
    int n;
    virtual void f() { n = 0; }

};

struct B : A
{
    void f() { n = 10; }

};

int main()
{
    B b;
    b.f();

}


Well that's pretty much non-virtual method inlining, because B::f is
not virtual (even though A::f is), not to mention that you're calling
it through a statically-known B instance.

In the code I'm writing, there are a lot of cases where the runtime
type is not known statically (after all, that's the whole point of
polymorphism).


The simple answer is that if the compiler can figure out at compile time
which virtual method will be called, then it has a chance to inline it
(or at least call it directly, rather than through the virtual method
mechanisms).

But if it cannot tell in advance which virtual method will be called, it
can't do any optimisation - it uses the standard virtual method call system.

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