181–190 of 252 posts
IMHO Inheritance (especially the C++ flavored inheritance with its access specifiers and myriad rules) has always scared me. It makes a codebase confusing and hard to reason with. I feel the eschewing of inheritance by languages such as Go and Rust is a step in the right direction. As an aside, I have noticed that the robotics frameworks (ROS and ROS2) heavily rely on inheritance and some co-dependent C++ features li…
IMHO Inheritance (especially the C++ flavored inheritance with its access specifiers and myriad rules) has always scared me. It makes a codebase confusing and hard to reason with. I feel the eschewing of inheritance by languages such as Go and Rust is a step in the right direction. As an aside, I have noticed that the robotics frameworks (ROS and ROS2) heavily rely on inheritance and some co-dependent C++ features li…
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Dynamic invocation, not strict inheritance is the issue here. Simply getting functions and fields from a superclass costs nothing if at each callsite the compiler knows enough to say where it is from.
But this may only happen when no virtual / overridden methods are involved, no VMT to look up in, no polymorphism at play. This is tanamount to composition, which should be preferred over inheritance anyway. In this regard, Go and Rust do classes / objects right, Java provides the classical pitfalls, and C++ is the territory where unspeakable horrors can be freely implemented, as usual.
I think many developers, especially in the range on 1999-2020, has gone through many pitfalls in programming. More specifically.. OOP. As someone who was blessed/lucky to learn C and Pascal.. with some VB6.. I understood how to write clean code with simple structs and functions. By the time I was old enough to get a job, I realised most (if not all) job adverts required OOP, Design Patterns, etc. I remember getting m…
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No, Java does Class hierarchy analysis and has multiple way not to use v-table calls. Single site (no class found overriding a method) are static and can be inlined directly. Dual call sites use a class check (which is a simple equality), can be inlined, no v-table. 3-5 call sites use inline caches (e.g. the compiler records what class have been used) that are similar and some can be inlined, usually plus a guard che…
Thats very cool. Does C++ have any of these optimisations?
But these optimizations are vastly less critical in C++ where only are minority of functions are virtual.
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Yeah, I have seen things like you describe. But I have also seen the same code, copy-pasted a dozen times throughout a codebase and modified over years. That is a much worse situation; the links between the abstractions still exist without the inheritance, but now they are untraceable. At least with inheritance there are links between the methods and classes for you to follow. Without it, you've got to crawl the enti…
I think you have the consequences of AI exactly backwards. AI provides virtual headcount and will vastly increase the ability of small teams to manage sprawling codebases. LLM context lengths are already on the order of millions of tokens. It takes a human days of work to come to grips with a codebase an LLM can grok in two seconds. The cost of working with code is much lower with LLMs than with humans and it's falli…
I'm not sold the evidence is there to show inheritance is a good idea - it basically says that constructors, data storage and interfaces need to be intertwined. That isn't a very powerful abstraction, because they don't need to be and there isn't an obvious advantage from doing so over picking up the concepts separately as required. And inheritance naturally suggests grouping interfaces into a tree in the way that se…
Yeah ya... everyone likes to go on and on about how inheritance is the root of all evil and if you just don't use it, everything will be fine. Sorry, it won't be fine. Your software will still be a mess unless it is small and written three times by the same person who knows what they are doing. The bottom line is, no one ever really used inheritance that much anyway (other than smart people trying to outsmart themsel…
I'm not sold the evidence is there to show inheritance is a good idea - it basically says that constructors, data storage and interfaces need to be intertwined. That isn't a very powerful abstraction, because they don't need to be and there isn't an obvious advantage from doing so over picking up the concepts separately as required. And inheritance naturally suggests grouping interfaces into a tree in the way that se…
Yeah ya... everyone likes to go on and on about how inheritance is the root of all evil and if you just don't use it, everything will be fine. Sorry, it won't be fine. Your software will still be a mess unless it is small and written three times by the same person who knows what they are doing. The bottom line is, no one ever really used inheritance that much anyway (other than smart people trying to outsmart themsel…
I've also written some code that's gotten a lot of mileage out of inheritance, including multiple inheritance. Some of my Python abstractions would not have worked anywhere near as well as they did without it. But even then, I could build APIs at least as usable in languages without inheritance, as long as those languages had sufficient facilities for abstraction of their own. (Which OCaml, Haskell and Rust absolutely do!)
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I don't think Inheritance is always bad - sometimes it's a useful tool. But it was definitely overused and composition, interfaces work much better for most problems. Inheritance really shines when you want to encapsulate behaviour behind a common interface and also provide a standard implementation. I.e: I once wrote a RN app which talked to ~10 vacuum robots. All of these robots behaved mostly the same, but each wa…
Inheritance is not the only way to share behavior across different implementations — it'a just the only way available in the traditional 1990s crop of static OOP languages like C++, Java and C#. There are many other ways to share an implementation of a common feature: 1. Another comment already mentioned default method implementations in an interface (or a trait, since the example was in Rust). This technique is even…
2003 Traits: Composable Units of Behaviour
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/courses/819/Scha03aTraits.pd...
" Traits as described in this paper are implemented in Squeak [22], an open-source dialect of Smalltalk-80."