> Most C++ code I see has few vtables, and what vtables exist are mostly removed by the compiler. Java-style inheritance hierarchies are not idiomatic in C++.

> Most C++ code I see has few vtables, and what vtables exist are mostly removed by the compiler. Java-style inheritance hierarchies are not idiomatic in C++. FWIW I feel like this is a fairly recent (good!) development. Up through TR/TR1 I think at least half the C++ code I saw was pretty heavy on the "Java envy" and not at all concerned about the cost of dynamic dispatch or memory allocation. Avoiding vtables was derided as part of "C with classes" - today that usually refers more to templates and exceptions but STL implementations were not mature enough and too much code not exception-safe for those to be universally viable back then. Something I heard more than once was that if you had a destructor it should always be virtual just in case someone wanted to subclass it later.