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Comment by lr4444lr | Hacker News Reader

This is not my experience. Multiple inheritance within a code base of certain sub-functionalities and states is a perfectly good example of reuse. You do not need to go all the way out to the library level. In fact, it is the abstract bases that really minimize the reusable parts that I find most useful.

I'm not saying you have to use classes to do this, but they certainly get the job done.

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We are talking about different things. If you want to use inheritance inside your module, behind a reasonable API, in order to re-use common logic, I won’t bat an eye. I won’t know, I’m working with the public part of your module.

If you structure your code so that people in my team can inherit from your base class (because you didn’t make an interface and left everything public), and later you change some of this common logic, then I will curse your name and the manner of your conception.

Since learning functional programming well. I feel a need to use inheritance in C++ maybe a handful of places.

The problem with inherentice reuse is if you need to do something slightly different you are out of luck. Alternatively with functions you call what you need. And can break apart functionality without changing the other reuses.

I know that a lot of people advocate for composition over inheritance. Inheritance can add a lot of complexity especially if it is deep or involves a lot of overrides. It can be difficult to find out where a method came from inside the inheritance chain or if it has been overridden and consequently how it will behave.

Composition at least makes things a little more obvious where methods are getting their functionality. It also has other benefits in terms of making objects easier to mock.

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