sizeof class with int , function, virtual function in C++?

Anshul
http://stackoverflow.com/

A friend asked me "Wwhen you declare a class with member functions in C++, the member function's definition goes in the code memory. What memory does it take in the class object? 32-bit pointer?"

Well, run it for yourself and know. :-)

Here's a sample program:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

class A
{
  public:
    int a;
    A(int val)   { a=val; }

    A() { a = 0; }

    int show(void);
/*    virtual int func(void);*/
};

int A::show(void)
{
  cout << a << endl;
}

int main()
{
  A a(10);
  a.show();

  cout << sizeof(a) << endl << sizeof(A) << endl;

  return(0);
}

The bookmark has some more details from a good post on stackoverflow.

CACHED ENTRY

Why siszeof(A) is 1 and sizeof(C) is 1 too ?

The function in C is not virtual, so the class doesn't need a vtable pointer, so it needs no more storage than A. Neither A nor C need any storage at all, but because language requires that different instances of the same class have different pointers, they can't have a size of zero - so the compiler makes them as small as it can, i.e. 1 byte.

Why siszeof(H) is 16 but sizeof(G) is 4 ?

G has no virtual functions, so all it needs to store is the int, which on your compiler and architecture is 4 bytes.

H has virtual functions, so the class needs to contain an int and a vtable pointer. All widely used compilers store the vtable pointer at the start of the class, so the layout is {vptr, int}, which is 8+4=12 bytes if you're on a 64 bit host.

However, the compiler is free to pad this out to 16 bytes so that if multiple instances of H are allocated in an array then all of them will be word-aligned. This is important because there are significant performance implications for accessing a pointer (i.e. the vtable pointer here) if it is not word-aligned.

Why siszeof(E) is 16 but sizeof(F) is 4 ?

E has virtual functions, so needs a vtable ptr, so its layout is just like H's. F has no virtual functions, it only has an int, so its layout is just like G's. so the answer's the same as for G and H.

The ordering of the members/functions just doesn't matter here because there's only one member variable and the vtable ptr always goes first if there is one.

Why siszeof(D) is 8 but sizeof(E) is 16 ?

D has no member variables, but it has a virtual function, so it needs a vtable pointer. The vtable pointer is the only thing it needs, so its size is sizeof(void*), which is 8 bytes. E needs the same as D, plus 4 bytes for an integer, and the compiler rounds it up to 16 bytes for alignment.

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