Performance Cost

OOP can introduce performance overhead into a project as part of dynamic dispatch and object instantiation. Dynamic dispatch allows objects to be assigned to variables of different types, which add a slight runtime cost as the system has to determine the appropriate method to execute. Likewise, object instantiation requires memory allocation and initialization, which may also impact performance, particularly in older system architectures. That being said, modern Java runtime environments feature optimizations that help mitigate these performance overheads. Therefore performance impact is acceptable for most applications and may not even be noticed. Still, it is a factor worth considering, especially for legacy systems.