How inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism work in C++

Posted on September 18, 2008, 6:15 pm, by Alexander Sandler, under Programming Articles.

Introduction
Encapsulation
How methods work
How overloading works
How mangling solves the problem
Structure and size of the object
How inheritance and polymorphism work
How basic polymorphism works
How multiple inheritance works
Difference between different casting types
Polymorphism and multiple inheritance
What if we try something even more complicated
Few words about C++ constructors
Conclusion

IntroductionBACK TO TOC

Inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism are undoubtedly the cornerstones of OOP/OOD in general and C++ in particular.
When programming C, it is very easy to remember how things work. You know that when you add an int variable to a structure it mostly grows by four bytes. You know that long is either four or eight bytes long depending on the architecture you’re working with.
Things are less obvious when moving to C++. OOP brings more abstractions to the program. As a result you are no longer sure if a+b sums two numbers or calls some overloaded operator method that concatenates contents of two files together.
In this article, I would like to give you a short insight into what’s going on behind the scenes. In particular we’ll see how the three whales of OOP work in C++.
Things that I am going to show in this article may differ from compiler to compiler. I will talk mostly about g++ (version 4.2.3). Note however, that same ideas apply everywhere.

EncapsulationBACK TO TOC

As you know, encapsulation is a principle by which same entity, the object, encapsulates data and methods that manipulate the data. You may be surprised to find out that underneath, class methods are just plain functions.

How methods workBACK TO TOC

In C++ there’s one fundamental difference between plain functions and class methods. Class methods receive one additional argument and that is the pointer to the object whose data the method is expected to manipulate. I.e. first argument to a method is pointer to this.
To speed things up, C++ developers used single CPU register (ECX/RCX on x86/x86_64) to pass pointer to this, instead of passing it via stack as if it was a regular function argument (no longer true in x86_64).
Otherwise, objects know nothing about methods that operate on them.

How overloading worksBACK TO TOC

Another thing that we have to take care of in C++ is how to distinguish between some_function() and some_class::some_function(). Or between some_class::some_function( int ) and some_class::some_function() I.e. what’s the difference between two methods with the same name that receive different number and type of arguments? What is the difference between method and function that has same name?
Obviously, out of linker, compiler and preprocessor, linker is the one that should be aware of the above difference. This is because we may have some_function() in some distant object file. Linker is the component that should find this distant function and interconnect the call to the function and the actual function. Linker uses function name as a unique identifier of the function.
To make things work, g++ and any other modern compiler, mangles the name of the method/function and makes sure that:

Mangled method name includes name of the class it belongs to (if it belongs to any class).
Mangled method name includes number and type of arguments method receives.
Mangled method name includes namespace it belongs to.

With these three, some_class::some_function() and some_function() will have totally different mangled name. See the following code sample.

01namespace some_namespace
02{
03    class some_class
04    {
05    public:
06        some_class() { }
07        void some_method() { }
08    };
09};
10 
11class some_class
12{
13public:
14    some_class() { }
15    void some_method() { }
16};
17 
18void some_method()
19{
20    int a;
21}

g++ will turn:

void some_class::some_method() into _ZN10some_class11some_methodEv
void some_namespace::some_class::some_method() into _ZN14some_namespace10some_class11some_methodEv
void some_method() into _Z11some_methodv

Adding integer argument to void some_method() will turn it from _Z11some_methodv to _Z11some_methodi.

How mangling solves the problemBACK TO TOC

So when you create two methods with same name, but with different arguments, compiler turns them into two functions with different names. Later, when linker links the code together it doesn’t know that these are two methods of the same class. From linkers standpoint, these are two different functions.

Structure and size of the objectBACK TO TOC

You probably already know that C++ class and good old C structures are nearly the same thing. Perhaps the only difference is that all class members are private unless specified otherwise. On the contrary, all structure members are public.
When looking at the memory layout of the object, it is very similar to C structure.

Differences begin when you add virtual methods. Once you add virtual methods to the class, compiler will create virtual methods table for the class. Then it will place pointer to the table in the beginning of each instance of this class.

Object vs. structure and virtual methods table

So, bear in mind that once your class has virtual methods, each object of this class will be four or eight bytes (depends on whether you have 64-bit support or not) bigger.
Actually, pointer to the virtual methods table does not have to be at the beginning of the object. It is just handy to keep it at the beginning, so g++ and most of the modern compilers do it this way.
Adding virtual methods to the class will also increase amount of RAM your program consumes and its size on your hard drive.

How inheritance and polymorphism workBACK TO TOC

Lets say we have two classes. A and B. Class B inherits from class A.

01#include <iostream>
02 
03using namespace std;
04 
05class A
06{
07public:
08    A() { a_member = 0; }
09    int a_member;
10};
11 
12class B : public A
13{
14public:
15    B() : A() { b_member = 0; };
16    int b_member;
17};
18 
19int main()
20{
21    A *a = new B;
22    a->a_member = 10;
23 
24    return 0;
25}

The interesting thing to notice here is that a actually points to instance of class B. When dereferencing a_member, we’re actually dereferencing a_member that defined in class A, but belongs to class B (via inheritance). To make this happen, compiler has to make sure that common part of both classes (a_member in our case) located at the same offset in the object.

Now what if we have some virtual methods.

How basic polymorphism worksBACK TO TOC

Let’s change our example a bit and add some virtual methods.

01#include <iostream>
02 
03using namespace std;
04 
05class A
06{
07public:
08    A() { a_member = 0; }
09    virtual int reset() { a_member = 0; }
10    void set_a_member( int a ) { a_member = a; }
11    int get_a_member() { return a_member; }
12protected:
13    int a_member;
14};
15 
16class B : public A
17{
18public:
19    B() : A() { b_member = 0; };
20    virtual int reset() { a_member = b_member = 0; }
21    virtual void some_virtual_method() { }
22    void set_b_member(int b ) { b_member = b; }
23    int get_b_member() { return b_member; }
24protected:
25    int b_member;
26};
27 
28int main()
29{
30    B *b = new B;
31    A *a = b;
32 
33    b->set_b_member( 20 );
34    b->set_a_member( 10 );
35 
36    a->reset();
37 
38    cout << b->get_a_member() << " " << b->get_b_member() <<
39        endl;
40 
41    return 0;
42}

If you compile and run this program it will obviously print “0 0″. But how, you may ask. After all we did a->reset(). Without our understanding of polymorphism we could think that we’re calling method that belongs to class A.
The reason it works is because when compiler sees code that dereferences pointer to A it expects certain internal object structure and when it dereferences pointer to B it expects different object structure. Let us take a look at both of them.

Classes A and B with virtual methods tables

However even more important here is the structure of the virtual methods tables of both classes.

It is because of the virtual methods table structure compilers knows what virtual method to call. When it generates the code that dereferences pointer to A, it expects that first method in the virtual methods table of the object will be pointer to right reset() routine. It doesn’t really care if the pointer actually points to B object. It will call first method of the virtual methods table anyway.

How multiple inheritance worksBACK TO TOC

Multiple inheritance makes things much more complicated. The problem is that when class C inherits from both A and B, we should have both members of class A and class B in the instance of class C.

01#include <iostream>
02 
03using namespace std;
04 
05class A
06{
07public:
08    A() { a_member = 0; }
09protected:
10    int a_member;
11};
12 
13class B
14{
15public:
16    B() { b_member = 0; }
17protected:
18    int b_member;
19};
20 
21class C : public A, public B
22{
23public:
24    C() : A(), B() { c_member = 0; }
25protected:
26    int c_member;
27};
28 
29int main()
30{
31    C c;
32 
33    A *a1 = &c;
34    B *b1 = &c;
35 
36    A *a2 = reinterpret_cast<A *>( &c );
37    B *b2 = reinterpret_cast<B *>( &c );
38 
39    printf( "%p %p %p\n", &c, a1, b1 );
40    printf( "%p %p %p\n", &c, a2, b2 );
41 
42    return 0;
43}

Once we cast pointer to class C into class B, we cannot keep the value of the pointer as is because first fields in the object occupied by fields defined in class A (a_member). Therefore, when we do casting we have to do a very special kind of casting – the one that changes the actual value of the pointer.
If you compile and run above code snippet, you will see that all the values are the same except for b1, which should be 4 bytes bigger than other values.

This is what (C style casting in our case) casting does – it increments the value of the pointer to make sure that it points to the beginning of the, inherited from B, part of the object.
In case you wonder what other types of casting will do, here is a short description.

Difference between different casting typesBACK TO TOC

There are five types of casting in C++.

reinterpret_cast<>()
static_cast<>()
dynamic_cast<>()
const_cast<>()
C style cast.

I guess you know already what const_cast<>() does. Also, it is only a compile time casting. C style cast is same as static_cast<>(). This leaves us with three types of casting.

reinterpret_cast<>()
static_cast<>()
dynamic_cast<>()

From the above example we learn that reinterpret_cast<>() does nothing to the pointer value and leaves it as is.
static_cast<>() and dynamic_cast<>() both modify value of the pointer. The difference between two is that the later relies on RTTI to see if the casting is legal – it looks inside the object to see if it truly belongs to the type we’re trying to cast from. static_cast<>() on the other hand, simply increments the value of the pointer.

Polymorphism and multiple inheritanceBACK TO TOC

Things getting even more complicated when we have virtual methods in each one of the classes A, B and C that we already met. Let’s add following virtual methods to the classes.

virtual void set_a( int new_a ) { a_member = new_a; }

To class A.

virtual void set_b( int new_b ) { b_member = new_b; }

To class B and

virtual void set_c( int new_c ) { c_member = new_c; }

To class C.

Dual inheritance with virtual methods table

You could have assumed that even in this case class C objects will have only one virtual tables methods, but this is not true. When you static_cast class C object into class B object, class B object must have its own virtual tables method. If we want to use same casting method as with regular objects (that is adding few bytes to the pointer to reach right portion of the object), then we have no choice but to place another virtual tables method in the middle of the object.

As a result, you can have many different virtual methods tables for the same class. The above diagram shows very simple case of inheritance and the truth is that it does not get more complicated than this. Take a look at the following, more complex, class hierarchy.

It may surprise you, but structure of the class X object will be quiet simple. In our previous example inheritance hierarchy had two branches. This one has three:

A-C-F-X
D-G-X
B-E-H-X

All end up with X of course. They are a little longer than in our previous example, but there is nothing special about them. The structure of the object will be the following:

Structure of derivative of the hierarchy

As a rule of thumb, g++ (and friends) calculates the branches that lead to the target class, class X in our case. Next it creates a virtual methods table for each branch and places all virtual methods from all classes in the branch into virtual methods table. This includes pointer to virtual methods of the class itself.
If we project this rule onto our last example. A-C-F-X branch virtual methods table will include pointers to virtual methods from classes A, C, F and X. Same with other two branches.

tHe puZZlingG wOrlD

Friday, December 23, 2011

Part 1: How inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism work in C++