✅   Inheritance was invented as a performance hack (2021)

Technology

It's well known that inheritance was invented by Simula. The History of Programming Languages session on Simula tells us the motivations behind that invention. Let's take a look. Simplifying the garbage collector Simula created inheritance instead of using composition because it allowed their garbage collector to be simpler. Simula had a simple reference counting and garbage collection implementation: Unable to find such a [manual memory allocation] scheme providing sufficient programming flexibility, we implemented a reference count scheme, an idea borrowed from Weizenbaum (1962), and also added a "last resort" garbage collector.

catern.com     May 06, 2025