Ok, that explains it. When you're used to Java it's easy to expect inheritance to be a big deal. The fact of the matter is that run-time polymorphism (aka virtu

Ok, that explains it. When you're used to Java it's easy to expect inheritance to be a big deal. The fact of the matter is that run-time polymorphism (aka virtual) is much more rarely necessary in the C++ world than the Java world. The only reason it's common in Java is that it's the only tool available for many job that C++ has other tools for, and it also avoids an extra composition overhead that doesn't exist in C++. tl;dr: Just because it's "infinitely more valuable" in Java doesn't mean the same for C++.