Class Equivalence Test

There are two ways of doing this:

• If you can guarantee that each class a unique vtable, you can simply compare the pointers to the vtable.
• If you cannot guarantee that each class has a unique vtable (because different vtables may have been merged by the linker), you need to add a unique field to the vtable so that you can compare that instead.

The first variant goes roughly as follows (assuming identical strings aren’t merged by the compiler, something that they are most of the time):

bool equal = (typeid(first) == typeid(other));

As far as I know, RTTI is simply done by adding two fields to the _vtable structure: parent and signature. The former is a pointer to the vtable of the parent class and the latter is the mangled (encoded) name of the class. To see if a given class is another class, you simply compare the signature fields. To see if a given class is a derived class of some other class, you simply walk the chain of parent fields, while checking if you have found a matching signature.