Q: What is virtual function?
A: A virtual function or virtual method is a function or method whose behavior can be overridden within an inheriting class by a function with the same signature. This concept is an important part of the polymorphism portion of object-oriented programming (OOP)
Q: What is a "pure virtual" member function?
A: The abstract class whose pure virtual method has to be implemented by all the classes which derive on these. Otherwise it would result in a compilation error. This construct should be used when one wants to ensure that all the derived classes implement the method defined as pure virtual in base class.
Q: How virtual functions are implemented C++?
A: Virtual functions are implemented using a table of function pointers, called the vtable. There is one entry in the table per virtual function in the class. This table is created by the constructor of the class. When a derived class is constructed, its base class is constructed _rst which creates the vtable. If the derived class overrides any of the base classes virtual functions, those entries in the vtable are overwritten by the derived class constructor. This is why you should never call virtual functions from a constructor: because the vtable entries for the object may not have been set up by the derived class constructor yet, so you might end up calling base class implementations of those virtual functions