this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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Programming
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inheritance rarely solves anything
You gotta know how to use it properly
At that point I would argue composition/traits are the way to go.
"This extends Draggable". That's great but now we can't extend "Button" to override the click handler.
Traits: You wanna have Health, and do Damage, but don't want to implement InventoryItem? No problem. You wanna be an Enemy and InventoryItem? Go for it. What's this function take? Anything that implements InventoryItem + Consumable
use an interface?
Yeah Interfaces would be the next best thing.
The only reason why traits are considered better is because in languages like rust it can enable static dispatch. Whereas interfaces in C#, Java, Typescript, (and C++ via abstract classes, not templates) are always dynamic dispatch.
Looking at the Rust docs, it looks like it's not much more than a difference in implementation under the hood.
It would be clunky, but in C# you could duct tape this: make a static abstract method in an interface that takes an object named 'self', then an extension method that extends the class and just casts then runs the function with Unsafe.As<TFrom, TTo>(ref obj), or an explicitly aligned struct with overlapping values.
I don't expect any such implementation anytime soon though :/
ps: Typescript can go take a hike, it's a superset for a language that was never designed for this