As for how inheritance works when the member function is not in the vtable, that depends on what kind of member function it is. All C++ functions are given a mangled name that is stuffed into C’s infrastructure for linking symbols. For static member functions, inheritance is irrelevant since they are tied to the class. Calls to static member functions go directly to the mangled function with no indirections, just as if it had been a global function. For non-static virtual member functions, you use the vtable pointer to find it. For non-virtual member functions, the call goes straight to the function as if a global function had been called (and the this pointer is still passed, even if the function does not use it), since the compiler knows the type and thus can tell the linker to have calls there go to the function through the appropriately mangled name. It is just like calling a global function.