If you look up "inheriting from STL containers", the top results from SO and reddit all mention it being a bad practice since standard containers aren't designed to be inherited from.

Specifically, they dont have virtual destructors so there's a risk of UB from deleting through pointer to base.

Also if you override any existing member functions and accidentally pass your derived class to a function expecting a regular STL container, the original base class member functions will get called instead(not to mention potential object slicing).

What if C++ had a way to publicly inherit from a class and also ban base class conversions to avoid potential usage pitfalls with something like this:

class Base

{

    public: 

    void foo()

    {

        std::println("Base foo");

    }

    void bar()

    {

        std::println("Base bar");

    }

};

class PublicDerived : public Base

{

    public: 

    void foo()

    {

        std::println("PublicDerived foo");

    }

};

class ComposedDerived : composed Base // new type of inheritance

{

    public: 

    void foo()

    {

        std::println("ComposedDerived foo");

    }

};

void testFoo(Base& val)

{

    val.foo();

}

int main()

{

    PublicDerived publicDerived;

    publicDerived.foo(); // prints "PublicDerived foo"

    publicDerived.bar(); // accessible, prints "Base bar"

    testFoo(publicDerived); // uh oh, prints "Base foo" even though we have our own foo

    ComposedDerived composedDerived;

    composedDerived.foo(); // prints "ComposedDerived foo"

    composedDerived.bar(); // still accessible, prints "Base bar"

    testFoo(composedDerived) // doesn't compile, conversion to base forbidden

    return 0;

}

Has anything like this ever been proposed?

Seems like it would address a common use case by making it possible to extend behavior of classes safely even if they weren't designed to be inherited from(i.e. no public virtual or protected nonvirtual destructor)