I know that virtual functions have an overhead of dereferencing to call a method. But I guess with modern architectural speed it is almost negligible.
- Is there any particular reason why all functions in C++ are not virtual as in Java?
- From my knowledge, defining a function virtual in a base class is sufficient/necessary. Now when I write a parent class, I might not know which methods would get over-ridden. So does that mean that while writing a child class someone would have to edit the parent class. This sounds like inconvenient and sometimes not possible?
Update:
Summarizing from Jon Skeet’s answer below:
It’s a trade-off between explicitly making someone realize that they are inheriting functionality [which has potential risks in themselves [(check Jon’s response)] [and potential small performance gains] with a trade-off for less flexibility, more code changes, and a steeper learning curve.
Other reasons from different answers:
Virtual functions cannot be in-lined because inlining have to happen at runtime. This have performance impacts when you expect you functions benefits from inlining.
There might be potentially other reasons, and I would love to know and summarize them.
There are good reasons for controlling which methods are virtual beyond performance. While I don’t actually make most of my methods final in Java, I probably should… unless a method is designed to be overridden, it probably shouldn’t be virtual IMO.
Designing for inheritance can be tricky – in particular it means you need to document far more about what might call it and what it might call. Imagine if you have two virtual methods, and one calls the other – that must be documented, otherwise someone could override the “called” method with an implementation which calls the “calling” method, unwittingly creating a stack overflow (or infinite loop if there’s tail call optimization). At that point you’ve then got less flexibility in your implementation – you can’t switch it round at a later date.
Note that C# is a similar language to Java in various ways, but chose to make methods non-virtual by default. Some other people aren’t keen on this, but I certainly welcome it – and I’d actually prefer that classes were uninheritable by default too.
Basically, it comes down to this advice from Josh Bloch: design for inheritance or prohibit it.