Cpp dispatch benchmark

A few months ago, I came across this article on this subreddit:

Four Ways to Dispatch a Runtime-Selected Strategy in C++

Most articles on this topic discuss dispatching methods in isolation, focusing heavily on the implementation details of a single approach. However, I wanted to see the bigger picture—not just pitting virtual functions against switch statements, but measuring the actual performance footprint of each strategy in real-world scenarios.

This benchmark does not claim to be academic or to represent absolute truth; I was simply curious to compare fundamentally different approaches. That is why I included not only standard comparisons like virtual functions vs. CRTP, but also deeply nested virtual calls that deliberately stress the instruction cache and branch predictor.

The project is still a work in progress. Living in Ukraine, frequent power outages caused by shelling have significantly limited my available development time.

AI Disclosure: Did I use AI for this project? Yes. Benchmarks starting from #12 were suggested by an LLM, which also helped refine the AVX2 search routine and proofread my English.

You can read about Eytzinger’s binary search here: https://algorithmica.org/en/eytzinger

The benchmark results are here: https://github.com/HarrierDuBoisX/Cpp-dispatch-benchmark/blob/main/result.md

You can find the code itself here: https://github.com/HarrierDuBoisX/Cpp-dispatch-benchmark