One final point. Sometimes, the choice between delegation and inheritance is driven by external factors such as programming language support for multiple inheritance or design constraints requiring polymorphism. Consider threads in Java. You can associate a class with a thread in one of two ways: either by extending (inheriting) directly from class Thread, or by implementing the Runnable interface and then delegating to a Thread object. Often the approach taken is based on the restriction in Java that a class can only extend one class (i.e., Java does not support multiple inheritance). If the class you want to associate with a thread already extends some other class in the design, then you would have to use delegation; otherwise, extending class Thread would usually be the simpler approach.