Sunday, May 29, 2011

Why doesn't C# support multiple inheritance?

This question is the one of the most frequently asked interview question. So lets see, what it is. Here is the answer i like the most found in Stack Overflow.

  • .NET was designed to support multiple languages, but not all languages can effectively support multiple inheritance. Or technically they could, but the complexities added in language semantics would make some of those languages more difficult to use (and less similar to their roots, like VB, and for backward compatibility reasons) and not worth the trade-off of being able to reuse code in the manner of multiple inheritance
  • It would also make cross-language library interoperability (via CLS compliance) less of a reality than it is today, which is one of the most compelling features of .NET. There are over 50 languages supported on .NET in over 70 implementations today
  • The most visible factor is language semantics complexity. In C++ we needed to add explicit language features in order to address ambiguities (such as the classic diamond problem) caused by multiple inheritance, such as the "virtual" keyword to support virtual inheritance to help the compiler resolve inheritance paths (and we had to use it correctly too)
  • As we know code is written 20% of the time, but read 80% of the time. Thus advocates on simplicity side prefer not to add language features for the sake of keeping semantics simple. In comparison C# code is significantly simpler to read than C++ code, and arguably easier to write