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Victor Cardona

03/24/2020, 10:45 PM
What is the most idiomatic way of expressing a class hierarchy in Kotlin? I found this blog post which used delegation, but I have heard that delegation is not a feature that many developers choose to use. Though in this case I can’t see the downside to it. My specific use case is a set of immutable classes where sub classes add additional properties only. Thanks!
d

Dico

03/26/2020, 9:54 AM
The most idiomatic way to express a hierarchy of classes is by using plain inheritance.
You may or may not want to partially flatten your hierarchy using composition.
Delegation is interesting but not necessary to express composition, you can do this with class properties.
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Victor Cardona

03/26/2020, 7:49 PM
True that you don’t need to use delegation to implement composition, but delegation does allow you to forgo chaining calls to properties:
A.prop
instead of
A.B.prop
. Well at least without having to write custom accessors.