Efficient C++ Performance Programming Techniques

Templates and Inheritance

Virtual function calls that can be resolved only at run-time will inhibit inlining. At times, that may pose a performance problem that we must solve. Dynamic binding of a function call is a consequence of inheritance. One way to eliminate dynamic binding is to replace inheritance with a template-based design. Templates are more performance-friendly in the sense that they push the resolution step from run-time to compile-time. Compile-time, as far as we are concerned, is free.

The design space for inheritance and templates has some overlap. We will discuss one such example.

Suppose you wanted to develop a thread-safe string class that may be manipulated safely by concurrent threads in a Win32 environment [BW97]. In that ...