Module Mixins a la Ruby
August 29, 2006

Multiple inheritance is usually considered bad, and many ways to avoid it have been developed. The first and most notable is interfaces, which are basically abstract classes (only declaration, no implementation). Another solution is mix-in classes, which add functionality (“implementation”) to the class, but do not affect the inheritance tree.

Mixins differ from regular classes mostly by their semantics (after all, they are just classes):

Also, if class Dog is a subclass of class Animal, then an instance of Dog is an instance of Animal as well (up-cast). On the other hand, a class that derives from a mixin class isn’t considered a subclass of that mixin class. For more info, see DictMixin in UserDict.py, or this ruby tutorial.

Ruby came with a strange idea – mixin modules. I don’t find this whole thing quite useful, as python (unlike ruby) supports multiple inheritance, but I wanted to show it’s possible in python as well. So here’s a two-liner metaclass decorator that does the trick.

Note: in ruby, adding a function to the module would also add it as a method of the class, but this is not the case here, as python imposes certain (arbitrary) limitations on that. Never mind.

Code

def mixin(mod):
    return type("mixin(%s)" % (mod.__name__,), (object,), mod.__dict__)

==Example== This is the code of testmixin.py

def foo(self, y):
    return self.x + y

@staticmethod
def boo(y):
    return 2 + y

And here’s a snapshot demo:

>>> import testmixin
>>>
>>> class Bar(mixin(testmixin)):
...     def __init__(self):
...         self.x = 8
...     def zoo(self):
...         return "zoo"
...
>>> b = Bar()
>>> b.zoo()
'zoo'
>>> b.foo(9) # foo is a method from testmixin
17
>>> b.boo(2) # foo is a staticmethod from testmixin
4
>>>