How does composition vs inheritance behave in multithreaded code?

In multithreaded code, the behavior of composition vs inheritance can be critical to ensure thread safety and to manage concurrency effectively. Inheritance allows one class to inherit the properties and behaviors of another, potentially leading to higher coupling between classes and making it challenging to manage concurrent access to shared resources. On the other hand, composition involves creating classes with reusable components, often resulting in better encapsulation and reduced dependency on a single class hierarchy, which can facilitate easier management of threads.

When designing multithreaded applications, composition is often preferred over inheritance. This is because composition allows for a more flexible architecture that can be more easily adapted to changes in requirements. Furthermore, composition limits the scope of thread contention as each component can manage its own state, reducing the likelihood of issues such as deadlocks or race conditions.

For example, consider the following PHP code demonstrating composition over inheritance in a simulated multithreaded environment:

<?php class DataProcessor { private $data; public function __construct($data) { $this->data = $data; } public function process() { // processing data return array_map('strtoupper', $this->data); } } class Worker { private $processor; public function __construct(DataProcessor $processor) { $this->processor = $processor; } public function run() { return $this->processor->process(); } } // Simulating multithreading with worker instances $data = ['apple', 'banana', 'cherry']; $processor = new DataProcessor($data); $worker1 = new Worker($processor); $worker2 = new Worker($processor); // In a real multithreaded environment, run() would be invoked in separate threads echo implode(', ', $worker1->run()) . "\n"; echo implode(', ', $worker2->run()) . "\n"; ?>

composition inheritance multithreading thread safety concurrency