Why should virtual functions not be used excessively?

Question

I just read that we should not use virtual function excessively. People felt that less virtual functions tends to have fewer bugs and reduces maintenance.

What kind of b

Answer 1

I worked sporadically as a consultant on the same C++ system over a period of about 7 years, checking on the work of about 4-5 programmers. Every time I went back the system had gotten worse and worse. At some point somebody decided to remove all the virtual functions and replace them with a very obtuse factory/RTTI-based system that essentially did everything the virtual functions were already doing but worse, more expensively, thousands of lines more code, lots of work, lots of testing, ... Completely and utterly pointless, and clearly fear-of-the-unknown-driven.

They had also hand-written dozens of copy constructors, with errors, when the compiler would have produced them automatically, error-free, with about three exceptions where a hand-written version was required.

Moral: don't fight the language. It gives you things: use them.