C++ How to Program, 10/e

12.8 (Optional) Polymorphism, Virtual Functions and Dynamic Binding “Under the Hood”

C++ makes polymorphism easy to program. It’s certainly possible to program for polymorphism in non-object-oriented languages such as C, but doing so requires complex and potentially dangerous pointer manipulations. This section discusses how C++ can implement polymorphism, virtual functions and dynamic binding internally. This will give you a solid understanding of how these capabilities really work. More importantly, it will help you appreciate the overhead of polymorphism—in terms of additional memory consumption and processor time. This can help you determine when to use polymorphism and when to avoid it. C++ Standard Library classes like array and vector ...