Overloading functions

[mrafcho001]

I was just wondering if overloading functions is efficient? I'm talking about having 20 overloads of a functions. Would that greatly slow down the program, or does the compiler choose which function to use at compile time?

[whiteflags]

20 overloded functions? What function are we talking about? What does it do? If we had some code, we could help you make a smarter decision. It sounds like you could get it to work with a template, but I can't be sure until I see something.

[ChaosEngine]

overloaded functions have no effect on runtime.
if you have 3 overloaded functions

void func(void);
void func(int x);
void func(string s);

the compiler uses name mangling to differentiate the functions. so you end up with

_func_void
_func_int
_func_string

or something like that (name mangling is implementation dependent)

so it shouldn't slow down the program at all.

edit: to be clear, the name mangling occurs at the linker level, so you don't need to worry about it when writing code.