One of the things that has been circulating around as a rumor the last couple of months is the implementation of Mixins into the .NET runtime
For those of you who don't know what a mix in is; it's basically interfaces with default implementation of some of it's virtual methods. This approach could probably be the solution for most of the cases where multiple inheritance would be a good idea, but not getting the diamond effect.
Now there has not been much substance in any of the rumors nor has anyone been able to get a straight answer; until today.
On my list of missions at the PDC, finding this out was one of my top priorities. So at the Ask The Experts session yesterday I talked a little bit about it with Shawn Wiltamuth from the C# language team. The story he told was that the C# team looks really positively about it but haven't started to look at the implementation yet. One of the key issues he thought was how deep in the CLI this should be implemented. His final statement was "we're carefully observing the progress around the research on this matter".
That was yesterday, today the same question was asked to the CLR team and the picture cleared a bit more. The CLR team is really psyched on getting this to into the VM and have given it some thought. Although, they stated, they have hade some resistance from some language designers that clearly didn't want this kind of complexity in their language.
Now putting two things together a pretty nice story takes form. The CLR guys want it, the C# team think it's a good idea, now who could be left?
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