Semantics of toString

[dsimcha]

== Quote from Steven Schveighoffer (schveiguy at yahoo.com)'s article
 By far a direct call is faster, but I was surprised at how
> little overhead virtual calls add in relation to the loop counter.  I had
> to use 10 billion loops or else the difference was undetectable.
> I used dmd 1.046 -release -O (the -release is needed to get rid of the
> class method checking the invariant every call).
> The relative assembly for calling a virtual method is:
> mov	ECX,[EBX]
> mov	EAX,EBX
> push	dword ptr -8[EBP]
> call	dword ptr 014h[ECX]
> and the assembly for calling a delegate is:
> push	dword ptr -8[EBP]
> mov	EAX,-010h[EBP]
> call	EBX
> -Steve

Your benchmarks don't show that the direct call is much faster.  You had inlining
disabled.  Was this intentional?  If so, it proves my point that most of the
overhead from virtual calls comes from the fact that they can't usually be
inlined, not because they're virtual.