As far as only virtual-function-specific functionality is considered, in a traditional approach to vtable implementation derived class would only need a separate version of vtable if that derived class overrides at least one virtual function. In your example, Derived
overrides virtual function print
. Since Derived
has it own version of print
, the corresponding entry in Derived
vtable is different from that in Base
vtable. This would normally necessitate a separate vtable for Derived
.
If Derived
didn't override anything at all, formally it still would be a separate polymorphic class, but in order to make its virtual functions work properly we could have simply reused Base
vtable for Derived
as well. So, technically there wouldn't be any need for a separate vtable for Derived
.
However, in practical implementations, the data structure that we usually refer to as "vtable", often holds some additional class-specific information as well. That extra information is so class-specific that most of the time it becomes impossible to share vtables between different classes in hierarchy, even if they use the same set of virtual functions. For example, some implementations the vtable pointer stored in each polymorphic object points to data structure that also stores so called "RTTI information" about the class. For this reason, in most (if not all) practical implementations each polymorphic class gets its own vtable, even if the virtual function pointers stored in those tables happen be the same.