What are relative costs of the 3 performance hits associated with allocating member objects from the freestore?
The three performance hits are enumerated in the previous FAQ: • By itself, an extra layer of indirection is small potatoes • Freestore allocations can be a performance issue (the performance of the typical implementation of malloc() degrades when there are many allocations; OO software can easily become “freestore bound” unless you’re careful) • The extra dynamic binding comes from having a pointer rather than an object. Whenever the C++ compiler can know an object’s exact class, virtual function calls can be statically bound, which allows inlining. Inlining allows zillions (would you believe half a dozen 🙂 optimization opportunities such as procedural integration, register lifetime issues, etc. The C++ compiler can know an object’s exact class in three circumstances: local variables, global/static variables, and fully-contained member objects Thus fully-contained member objects allow significant optimizations that wouldn’t be possible under the “member objects-by-pointer” approach.
