inheritance chaining

[onyx heart]

Generally, I've seen that people recommend inheritance to be shallow, but just curious, in a professional setting does it tend to get deep/complex?

[hazy thicket]

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[chilly bridge]

Not necessarily.
In really really big and old codebases it could be, but that doesn’t mean it’s good or recommended.

You should prefer composition over inheritance wherever possible.

That being said, it’s not every deep inheritance that’s bad. As always, it depends on the context and the problem in hand that’s being solved.

[onyx heart]

Gotcha. Composition as in composition and aggregation right

[chilly bridge]

as in, instead of your class inheriting other classes, you should design it in such a way that it uses other classes instances as data members.

Eg.

class Type : public Type2
{…};

// vs

class Type
{
  Type2 obj;
};

[onyx heart]

Okay I see

Just making sure I understand them correctly.
Composition is where a class has another class and owns it
Aggregation is where a class has another class but doesn’t own it(holds a pointer)

Would you say aggregation is less common? Or just depends on the context

[chilly bridge]

Entirely depends on context

[onyx heart]

Sounds good!

[fallen spindle]

more often you will be decryping classes with inheritance written by some senior dev 15 years ago who left the company, and intelisense aint gonna do anything, so you will need to dectypt all existing base classes and all existing derived classes from that base

[onyx heart]

😭sounds like a headache lol

[fallen spindle]

nah it's ez
forcefully insert a compile error like, rename some class from
ValueBase to ValueBaseFake

and watch as the compielr spits out all occurences of ValueBase saying "ValueBase not found, did you mean ValueBaseFake?"

[onyx heart]

Welp

😓