What are the performance implications of marking methods / properties as virtual?
Question is as stated in the title: What are the performance implications of marking methods / properties as virtual?
Note - I'm assuming the virtual methods will not be overloaded in the common case; I'll usually be working with the base class here.
Answer
Virtual functions only have a very small performance overhead compared to direct calls. At a low level, you're basically looking at an array lookup to get a function pointer, and then a call via a function pointer. Modern CPUs can even predict indirect function calls reasonably well in their branch predictors, so they generally won't hurt modern CPU pipelines too badly. At the assembly level, a virtual function call translates to something like the following, where I is an arbitrary immediate value.
MOV EAX, [EBP + I] ; Move pointer to class instance into register
MOV EBX, [EAX] ; Move vtbl pointer into register.
CALL [EBX + I] ; Call function
Vs. the following for a direct function call:
CALL I ; Call function directly
The real overhead comes in that virtual functions can't be inlined, for the most part. (They can be in JIT languages if the VM realizes they're always going to the same address anyhow.) Besides the speedup you get from inlining itself, inlining enables several other optimizations such as constant folding, because the caller can know how the callee works internally. For functions that are large enough not to be inlined anyhow, the performance hit will likely be negligible. For very small functions that might be inlined, that's when you need to be careful about virtual functions.
Edit: Another thing to keep in mind is that all programs require flow control, and this is never free. What would replace your virtual function? A switch statement? A series of if statements? These are still branches that may be unpredictable. Furthermore, given an N-way branch, a series of if statements will find the proper path in O(N), while a virtual function will find it in O(1). The switch statement may be O(N) or O(1) depending on whether it is optimized to a jump table.