Getting list of all existing vtables.

Posted by Patrick on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Patrick
Published on 2010-06-14T07:33:13Z Indexed on 2010/06/14 7:42 UTC
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In my application I have quite some void-pointers (this is because of historical reasons, application was originally written in pure C). In one of my modules I know that the void-pointers points to instances of classes that could inherit from a known base class, but I cannot be 100% sure of it. Therefore, doing a dynamic_cast on the void-pointer might give problems. Possibly, the void-pointer even points to a plain-struct (so no vptr in the struct).

I would like to investigate the first 4 bytes of the memory the void-pointer is pointing to, to see if this is the address of the valid vtable. I know this is platform, maybe even compiler-version-specific, but it could help me in moving the application forward, and getting rid of all the void-pointers over a limited time period (let's say 3 years).

Is there a way to get a list of all vtables in the application, or a way to check whether a pointer points to a valid vtable, and whether that instance pointing to the vtable inherits from a known base class?

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