Performance of dynamic_cast?

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Firstly, you need to measure the performance over a lot more than just a few iterations, as your results will be dominated by the resolution of the timer. Try e.g. 1 million+, in order to build up a representative picture. Also, this result is meaningless unless you compare it against something, i.e. doing the equivalent but without the dynamic casting.

Secondly, you need to ensure the compiler isn’t giving you false results by optimising away multiple dynamic casts on the same pointer (so use a loop, but use a different input pointer each time).

Dynamic casting will be slower, because it needs to access the RTTI (run-time type information) table for the object, and check that the cast is valid. Then, in order to use it properly, you will need to add error-handling code that checks whether the returned pointer is NULL. All of this takes up cycles.

I know you didn’t want to talk about this, but “a design where dynamic_cast is used a lot” is probably an indicator that you’re doing something wrong…

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