Simonson, Lucanus J wrote:
I clearly understand the reason why the destructor of polymorphic types should be declared virtual. I was trying to make an argument against polymorphism in general, because it produces much greater runtime overhead than most people seem to appreciate when used on simple types
Hmm, 'much greater runtime overhead' is quite strong. This needs to be backed up for every particular case, to assess the real impact. Otherwise any such concern is just premature optimization.
that should be heavily inlined. In fact, I don't myself understand the
Even inlining itself can have (negative) impact on performance, as you increase code size. And, speaking of performance, there are sometimes good reasons not to use exceptions (not even exception *specifiers*), since this involves added synthesized code that incurs performance overhead. So, whether that particular case of 'virtual' is worth all the trouble is questionable.
reason Emil has for not declaring the destructor virtual in this case. He said he didn't care about overhead, after all. I was simply pointing out that the overhead is greater than what Hartmut suggested. So great, in fact, that I prefer to avoid polymorphic programming style for that very reason.
Yes, understood. Thanks, Stefan -- ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...