Do function pointers force an instruction pipeline to clear?

Question

Modern CPUs have extensive pipelining, that is, they are loading necessary instructions and data long before they actually execute the instruction.

Sometimes, the da

Answer 1

There's not a great deal of difference between a function-pointer call and a "normal" call, other than an extra level of indirection. So potentially there's a greater latency involved; if the destination address is not already in cache or registers, then the CPU potentially has to wait while it's retrieved from main memory.

So the answer is; yes, the pipeline can stall, but this is no different to normal function calls. And as usual, mechanisms such as branch prediction and out-of-order execution can help minimise the penalty.