Registration is now open for CppCon 2021, which starts on October 24 and will be held both in person and online. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting videos of some of the top-rated talks from our most recent in-person conference in 2019 and our online conference in 2020. Here’s another CppCon talk video we hope you will enjoy – and why not register today for CppCon 2021 to attend in person, online, or both!

Back to Basics: Virtual Dispatch and its Alternatives

by Inbal Levi

Summary of the talk:

Code efficiency is one of the strongest features of modern C++, therefore broadly used in industries with a need for high performance, such as Real-Time or Embedded Systems.

In this talk, we will go through the search for high run-time efficiency using the dispatch mechanism.

We will start by providing tools for understanding and estimating run-time performance cost.

Next, we'll analyze a test case, and dive into some of the most fundamental components of the language such as inheritance, and templates.

We will continue by introducing implementations which produce high run-time efficiency code such as CRTP, std::variant and visitor, and use them to maximize performance.

Finally, we will do benchmarking and draw conclusions, and try to answer the question -
How can we use C++ ideally for achieving high-performance efficiency?