C++ Polymorphism., static or dynamic inheritance

Traditional C++ programmers are used to think that everything should be modelled as a collection of classes and objects, organized in a hierarchy.

Inheriting is a great thing, but sometime you don't want to pay the overhead of a virtual method. I mean, anytime you overide a method the compiler will add a new entry in the virtual table and at run-time a pointer must be deferenced. When performance is crucial or when you call a method several times in your code you may want to save this cost.

In these situations, Modern C++ programmers prefer to adop a kind of compile-time variant of the strategy pattern. At compile time, the appropriate class and method is called during template instatiation. In this sense, Policy-based design is very useful when you want to save the cost of the virtual table.

In this example, I wrote a distance class and a method distance which is potentially used very frequently by any clustering algorithm. The method can be either a EuclideanDistance, or any kind of different distance. And there is no need of any additional virtual table, every choice is made at compile time statically.

Here you find the code.