Performance penalty for working with interfaces in C++?

by

Short Answer: No.

Long Answer:
It is not the base class or the number of ancestors a class has in its hierarchy that affects it speed. The only thing is the cost of a method call.

A non virtual method call has a cost (but can be inlined)
A virtual method call has a slightly higher cost as you need to look up the method to call before you call it (but this is a simple table look up not a search). Since all methods on an interface are virtual by definition there is this cost.

Unless you are writing some hyper speed sensitive application this should not be a problem. The extra clarity that you will recieve from using an interface usually makes up for any perceived speed decrease.

More Related Contents:

  1. Virtual functions and performance – C++
  2. What is the performance cost of having a virtual method in a C++ class?
  3. Which yields faster code?
  4. How to get the CPU cycle count in x86_64 from C++?
  5. Why does C++ code for testing the Collatz conjecture run faster than hand-written assembly?
  6. Is there any advantage of using map over unordered_map in case of trivial keys?
  7. Static linking vs dynamic linking
  8. Why does C++ compilation take so long?
  9. C++ virtual function return type
  10. Fastest way to determine if an integer is between two integers (inclusive) with known sets of values
  11. Using scanf() in C++ programs is faster than using cin?
  12. Efficient way of storing Huffman tree
  13. How do exceptions work (behind the scenes) in c++
  14. Relative performance of std::vector vs. std::list vs. std::slist?
  15. call to pure virtual function from base class constructor
  16. Does a C++11 range-based for loop condition get evaluated every cycle?
  17. linux perf: how to interpret and find hotspots
  18. Performance of dynamic_cast?
  19. Is there a 128 bit integer in C++?
  20. What is the Fastest Method for High Performance Sequential File I/O in C++?
  21. Return Type Covariance with Smart Pointers
  22. C++ cout printing slowly
  23. Fastest way to get a positive modulo in C/C++
  24. Do c++ templates make programs slow?
  25. Performance Tradeoff – When is MATLAB better/slower than C/C++
  26. Abstract Class vs Interface in C++ [duplicate]
  27. Hashtable in C++?
  28. Does auto deduce the type at compile time or runtime in C++ 11?
  29. Measuring exception handling overhead in C++
  30. Use-cases of pure virtual functions with body?

Leave a Comment