Memory Layout for Multiple and Virtual Inheritance

In this article we explain the object layout implemented by gcc for multiple and virtual inheritance. Although in an ideal world C++ programmers should not need to know these details of the compiler internals, unfortunately the way multiple (and especially virtual) inheritance is implemented has various non-obvious consequences for writing C++ code (in particular, for downcasting pointers, using pointers to pointers, and the invocation order of constructors for virtual bases). If you understand how multiple inheritance is implemented, you will be able anticipate these consequences and deal with them in your code. Also, it is useful to understand the cost of using virtual inheritance if you care about efficiency. Finally, it is interesting :-)

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