Delegation

Class Delegation

The Delegation pattern has proven to be a good alternative to implementation inheritance, and Kotlin supports it natively requiring zero boilerplate code. A class Derived can inherit from an interface Base and delegate all of its public methods to a specified object:

interface Base {
  fun print()
}

class BaseImpl(val x: Int) : Base {
  override fun print() { print(x) }
}

class Derived(b: Base) : Base by b

fun main() {
  val b = BaseImpl(10)
  Derived(b).print() // prints 10
}

The by{: .keyword }-clause in the supertype list for Derived indicates that b will be stored internally in objects of Derived and the compiler will generate all the methods of Base that forward to b.