Re: How make polymorphism optional?

From:
tony_in_da_uk@yahoo.co.uk
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Sat, 6 Sep 2008 19:35:40 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<4c5c87cd-b8b6-499e-b85b-02753b0817b9@b30g2000prf.googlegroups.com>
On Sep 7, 12:09 am, Litvinov Sergey <slitvi...@gmail.com> wrote:

Sometime I have no objects of Derived class and in those cases
I would like to get rid of polymorphism overhead. (speed is crucial
for
me). It is OK for me to have
a separate binary to handle those cases. But the only design I came up
with is
with preprocessor to "separate" virtual keyword in class definition

class Base {
#ifdefine NOPOLYMORPHISM
  void
method();
#else
  virtual void
method();
#endif

}

and the part of the program where the concrete type of the objects is
defined should
be also modified.

Is there any better way to do that?


Perhaps something like:

struct Base
{
  virtual void virtual_method() { base_method(); }
  void base_method();
  void method() { if (s_use_virtual_) virtual_method(); else
base_method(); }
  static bool s_use_virtual_;
};

And set s_use_virtual_ at runtime based on whether you've created any
derived objects. It still has some run-time overhead, but I think
you'll find it's pretty small compared to out-of-line function
invocation.

HTH,

Tony

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