Does OOP concepts like inheritance optimize perfomance of an application?

Question

Does OOP just organizes code (and make your life easier when maintaining, updating application) or it organizes and OPTIMIZES (perfomance, under the hood)?

For example is:

public class Ferrari {
   ..speed;
   ..color;

   ..changeGear(){..change-gear-class-releated-stuff like 8 gears or something}
   ..turnLeft(){...}

the same like:

public class Ferrari extends Car {
   @Override
   ..changeGear(){
   super.changerGear();
   ..change-gear-class-releated-stuff like 8 gears or something
   }

public class Car{
   ..speed;
   ..color;

   ..changeGear(){...}
   ..turnLeft(){...}

for the sake of perfomance?

Performance optimization is a subject about which many programmers are amazingly ignorant, and they have all kinds of strange misconceptions. The way to learn it is to actually do some performance tuning, and [*here's an example.*](http://stackoverflow.com/a/927773/23771) — Mike Dunlavey, Feb 21 '15 at 18:25

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 21 '15 at 17:08

Basically, no.

As with everything, you have to stick a big IT DEPENDS on just about everything, but as far as execution performance, no, inheritance does not improve performance.

What it can improve is overall code density, as the shared code is truly shared among the subclasses, rather than duplicated.

In some language implementation, inheritance can slow performance. Consider the runtime searching for a method on a subclass. When it first looks for the method, it finds that the method does not exist on the subclass and must then perform a search on the respective super classes of the method. Those super class searches can certainly have some impact.

But that's an implementation detail. Other systems will pay that cost at compile time, rather than runtime, thus having no actual performance cost.

So, you can see that it's not necessarily a black and white solution.

Well that's sad...because although one programmer has GREAT OOP skills, that doesn't distinguish him from programmer that has AVERAGE OOP skill in the point of end user ("customer", user of an application) ...end user just cares about functionality and perfomance, not code organizing..thanks, i got it :) everything is relative ;) — Šime Tokić, Feb 21 '15 at 17:21

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 07 '19 at 12:25

2

In compiled languages it does not improve performances, probably just increase compile time.

answered Aug 07 '19 at 12:25

Trimuli

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 21 '15 at 17:05

Object orientation may prevent certain algorithmic optimizations, because of inheritance. Two algorithms may work particularly well together, but if they are hidden behind OO interfaces, the possibility to use their synergy is lost.

Look at numerical libraries. A lot of them (not only those written in the 60s or 70s) are not OOP. There is a reason for that -- numerical algorithms work better as a set of decoupled modules than as OO hierarchies with interfaces and encapsulation.

Does OOP concepts like inheritance optimize perfomance of an application?

3 Answers3