Introduction to Design Patterns in C++ with Qt, 2nd Edition

Chapter 22: Inheritance in Detail

This chapter formalizes and details some of the concepts introduced earlier in Chapter 6, “Inheritance and Polymorphism.” We explain how constructors, destructors, and copy assignment operators are generated and used by derived classes. We discuss how the keywords public, private, and protected can be used for base classes and members. We also provide examples of multiple inheritance.

22.1 virtual Pointers, virtual Tables

Each class that contains methods (virtual functions) has a virtual jump table, or vtable, which is generated as part of the “lightweight” C++ execution environment. The vtable can be implemented in a number of ways, but the simplest implementation (which is often the fastest and most lightweight) ...