[astral303]

I don’t think so, because it is the runtime JIT (Just-In-Time) optimizer that is the critical speed advantage that allows the CLR and JVM to beat C and C++.

The inlining of virtual calls is the critical optimization that enables this. Because C/C++ is optimized statically and never at runtime, it is unable to optimize results of function pointer lookups (in C, and thus also virtual calls in C++). However, the JITs can inline through function pointer lookups.

In sufficiently complex programs, where polymorphism is used (i.e. old code that calls new code without knowing about it), this yields an unsurpassed speed advantage. Polymorphism is critical to managing complexity as an application evolves (even the Linux kernel, written in C, uses polymorphism, e.g. see struct file_operations).