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Inheritance was invented as a performance hack (2021)

's well known that inheritance was invented by Simula. The History of Programming Languages session on Simula tells us the motivations behind that invention.

Inheritance was invented by the Simula language as a way to support intrusive lists, save memory, and simplify the garbage collector. When writing simulation programs we had observed that processes often shared a number of common properties, both in data attributes and actions, but were structurally different in other respects so that they had to be described by separate declarations. – Section 3.1, The Development Of The Simula Languages As a result of the limitations of their GC, they weren't able to use "parametrization" (what we'd call composition) to customize classes.

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