Beginning C++ Programming

Using mixin classes

The mixin technique allows you to provide extensibility to classes without the lifetime issues of composition or the heavyweight aspect of raw inheritance. The idea here is that you have a library with specific functionality that can be added to an object. One way to do this is to apply it as a base class with public methods, and so if the derived class publicly derives from that class, it will also have those methods as public methods. This works fine unless the functionality requires that the derived class performs some functionality too in those methods, in which case the documentation of the library will require that the derived class overrides the method, calls the base class implementation, and adds their own code ...