Virtual Method Table and accident prevention

That is also true for programming, and for programming on C++ it is true twice as much. In this article, I shall explain an important language feature, known as virtual table pointer, which is included in almost every nontrivial class, and how it can accidentally be damaged. Damaged virtual table pointer may lead to very difficult to fix errors. First, I am going to recall what virtual table pointer is, and then I shall share my thoughts what and how can be broken there.

To my regret, in this article will be a lot of reasoning related to low level. However, there is no other way to illustrate the problem. In addition, I should tell that this article is written for Visual C++ compiler in 64-bit mode - results may differ with usage of other compilers and other target systems.

Article: http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0287/