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The default form of dispatch is static. To get dynamic dispatch the programmer must declare a method as virtual. C++ compilers typically implement dynamic dispatch with a data structure called a virtual function table (vtable) that defines the name-to-implementation mapping for a given class as a set of member function pointers. This is purely ...
This is a generalization of single-dispatch polymorphism where a function or method call is dynamically dispatched based on the derived type of the object on which the method has been called. Multiple dispatch routes the dynamic dispatch to the implementing function or method using the combined characteristics of one or more arguments.
An object's virtual method table will contain the addresses of the object's dynamically bound methods. Method calls are performed by fetching the method's address from the object's virtual method table. The virtual method table is the same for all objects belonging to the same class, and is therefore typically shared between them.
Virtual functions allow a program to call methods that don't necessarily even exist at the moment the code is compiled. [citation needed] In C++, virtual methods are declared by prepending the virtual keyword to the function's declaration in the base class. This modifier is inherited by all implementations of that method in derived classes ...
This feature is known as dynamic dispatch. If the call variability relies on more than the single type of the object on which it is called (i.e. at least one other parameter object is involved in the method choice), one speaks of multiple dispatch. A method call is also known as message passing. It is conceptualized as a message (the name of ...
The call is therefore subject to all the usual additional performance costs that are associated with dynamic resolution of calls, usually more than in a language supporting only single method dispatch. In C++, for example, a dynamic function call is usually resolved by a single offset calculation - which is possible because the compiler knows ...
In computer science, a dispatch table is a table of pointers or memory addresses to functions or methods. [1] Use of such a table is a common technique when implementing late binding in object-oriented programming .
In computing, late binding or dynamic linkage [1] —though not an identical process to dynamically linking imported code libraries—is a computer programming mechanism in which the method being called upon an object, or the function being called with arguments, is looked up by name at runtime.