Strange behaviour in C++...
Jeffrey A Law
law@cygnus.com
Wed Aug 25 15:01:00 GMT 1999
> Mike Stump writes:
> > Forget about talk, talk is cheap. What I have _never_ seen, are real
> > performance numbers for real applications and/or micro benchmarks,
> > that show what the numbers are.
>
> I'd like to second Mike's comments. What you may be overlooking, Jeff, is
> that the vast, vast majority of C++ objects are plain single inheritance,
> which means that no thunks are needed and the non-thunks implementation
> needs twice as much data space for the virtual function tables. So it
> simply does not matter if thunks are slower, since thunks are rarely
> called. It is a time-space tradeoff where the excess time cost is rare.
I understand completely, and unfortunately I left out a few important details.
Most importantly that there is a group working on a C++ ABI which (from my
understanding) will not include thunks (due to the performance concerns).
I don't think we want to burn a lot of time on thunks if there's a reasonable
chance the C++ ABI will take a different direction.
Hopefully the people involved in this project are reading this list & thread
and
will chime in, particularly if I've mis-stated what's happening and why.
jeff
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