Re: unloading plugins (i.e. shared objects) nearly impossible!
kanze wrote:
davidbaraff@gmail.com wrote:
[...]
If STL happened to use virtual functions (which it doesn't)
[...]
You don't know this. Stepanov didn't believe in virtual
functions, and most implementations today still derive from his
original implementation. But in a context where memory is
tight, and you can't afford code duplication, a base class
factoring out the common behavior, and using virtual functions
for the type specific parts, could be a very reasonable
implementation. Such an implementation would be perfectly
conformant.
No - although an implementation is free to add its own non-virtual
member functions to a standard library class, it is emphatically barred
from adding any virtual methods of its own to a standard class (see
lib.member.functions in chapter 17). Therefore, since none of the
standard container classes declare virtual methods, and an
implementation is barred from adding any, it is safe to rely on the
fact that the standard container classes have no virtual methods.
Greg
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