The following is a draft proposal to support a form of single inheritance, similar to that found in object-oriented languages. The goal is to enable servo to efficiently support structures like the DOM. The proposal is not completely rounded out, but I wanted to put it up in its current form so as to gather any comments.

In a nutshell, the proposal is to:

Enable structs to extend other structs, meaning that the substruct inherits all fields of the superstruct, and also enabling a subtyping relationship between borrowed pointers. Enable traits to extend structs. This allows direct access to fields of that struct, but means that the trait can only be implemented by structs that extend the base struct. In short, a trait that extends a struct is less general but potentially more efficient (this is a similar tradeoff to using a abstract class vs an interface in Java).

Structs extending structs

Syntactically, struct inheritance would be done with a single colon:

struct NodeFields { id: uint, ... } struct ElementFields : NodeFields { ... }

A struct type can extend at most one other struct. A struct which extends another is called a substruct of the extended struct. Hence, ElementFields is a substruct of NodeFields . Note that ElementFields is not a subtype of NodeFields (subtyping will be discussed in detail later). Every struct is considered a substruct of itself (hence NodeFields is a substruct of NodeFields ).

Traits extending structs

When declaring a trait, it is already legal to specify a set of supertraits. It would now be possible to specify at most one superstruct. The superstruct must appear first in the list.

Example:

trait Node : NodeFields { ... } trait Element : ElementFields, Node { ... }

If a trait T extends a struct S , then any subtraits of T must themselves extend substructs of S . In other words, in the previous example, it would be illegal for Element to extend Node without also extending NodeFields or some substruct of NodeFields (in this case, Element extends ElementFields ). This rule extends naturally to cases where a trait extends many other traits: the trait must then extend a struct which is a substruct of the superstructs of all its supertraits.

Implementing a trait with a superstruct

If a trait extends a struct, then it can only be implemented by substructs of that struct.

Example:

impl Node for NodeFields { /* ok -- `NodeFields` is a substruct of `NodeFields` */ } impl Node for ElementFields { /* ok -- `ElementFields` is a substruct of `NodeFields` */ } impl Node for &NodeFields { /* not ok, `&NodeFields` is not a struct at all */ } struct Foo { ... } impl Node for Foo { /* not ok, `Foo` does not extend `NodeFields` */ }

Access to fields

When a trait T extends a struct, it is legal to access the fields of that struct any value known to implement trait T . That includes type parameters bounded by T and objects of type T .

Example:

fn get_id<T:Node>(x: &T) -> uint { x.id } fn get_id(x: &Node) -> uint { x.id }

Subtyping

Borrowed pointers to substructs have a subtyping relationship. More concretely, &S <: &T and &mut S <: &mut T if S is a substruct of T.

Note that the following relationships do not hold:

S <: T – the two struct types have differing sizes and are generally not equivalent. Consider the ramifications on types like ~[S] and ~[T] etc.

– the two struct types have differing sizes and are generally not equivalent. Consider the ramifications on types like and etc. ~S <: ~T – when freed, any destructors associated with S and T would run. If we permitted subtyping, we’d need virtual destructors for all owned struct pointers.

Inherent methods

Inherent methods defined on a struct type S are available for use by substructs of S , objects for some subtrait of S , and type parameters implementing a subtrait of S .

Interaction with coherence

I think that there is no special interaction with coherence required. We already have the means to reason about coherence in the face of possible subtyping. But I reserve the right to add something more here if I think of it. =)

Coercions

If a trait T extends a struct S , it should be possible to coerce an object &T to an &S . Same is true for type parameter &A where A:T . Not sure whether this should be an automatic coercion or one that requires some keyword – automatic should be possible.

Expected patterns

Struct inheritance can be combined with traits and object types to achieve a combination of direct field access, virtual method calls, and statically dispatched calls. For example, the DOM in Servo would likely be modeled as follows (the code sample assumes DST).