AI Applications in C++: How costly are virtual functions? What are the possible optimizations?

Question

In an AI application I am writing in C++,

1. there is not much numerical computation
2. there are lot of structures for which run-time polymorphism is ne

Answer 1

Have you actually profiled and found where, and what needs optimization?

Work on actually optimizing virtual function calls when you have found they actually are the bottleneck.