JS gotchas with this and new

Note

This was originally posted on Medium.com on December 23, 2015, but I’m reposting it on my personal blog on January 5, 2017.

Introduction

Love it or hate it, you’ve probably used JavaScript at some point. JavaScript has two keywords to aid in writing object-oriented code: this and new. Despite the Java namesake for JavaScript, these keywords work completely differently in JavaScript, and are frequently misunderstood or used improperly on accident. This post explains the behavior of this and new, and explores common mistakes with using them, as well as how to write more resilient code without them.

Strict mode behavior of this and new

The current version of ECMAScript (the official standard name for JavaScript) is ES2015, but back with the release of ES5, a feature was added called strict mode. Strict mode is used by starting a file or function with the string literal "use strict" (including quotes). Strict mode changes the semantics of many areas of the language, so I will be covering how it affects this and new as well.

I will start with an explanation of how this works in strict mode, since it’s easier to follow. You can think of this as an implicit parameter to every JavaScript function. You do not declare it in the parameter list and you can’t pass it like a normal argument.

This with function calls

function add(x, y) {
  console.log("this =", this);
  return x + y;
}

add(3, 4); // Prints "this = undefined"

In the example above, this is implicitly a parameter of add, like it is with every function, and it’s implicitly passed to the function in the console.log line. When a function is invoked in the default manner like foo(x), this is set to undefined.

This with method calls

There is another case where this is passed implicitly: foo.bar() and foo["bar"](). When the function itself is being referenced directly from an object, the parent object itself is passed as this, which would be foo in this case.

var janelle = {
  name: "Janelle",
  getName: function () {
    return this.name;
  },
};
console.log(janelle.getName());

This will log “Janelle” to the console, as we wanted. But let’s make a slight change and see how this works:

Gotcha: Forgetting this

var janelle = {
  name: "Janelle",
  getName: function () {
    return this.name;
  },
};

function greet(getName) {
  console.log("Hello, ", getName());
}

var getName1 = function () {
  return "Lukas";
};
var getName2 = janelle.getName;
greet(getName1); // "Hello, Lukas"
greet(getName2); // Error, cannot get property "name" of undefined

Ok, so what happened here? Notice that even though we get the function from janelle.getName, we invoke it using the plain style as getName(), so undefined is passed as the value of this. JavaScript has a built-in method for dealing with this—bind—used like janelle.getName.bind(janelle). This is a bit wordy, and incredibly easy to forget, but it does give you a new function which will pass janelle as the value of this, even if the function is invoked in the plain style like getName() with no object.

Functions which accept functions as parameters (known as higher-order functions) are all over the place in JavaScript: setTimeout, Array.prototype.map, Array.prototype.forEach, Promise.prototype.then, and many more. Any of these functions are potential places for errors when passing functions using this from an object as an argument.

An infuriating real life example

A practical example you may have run into before involves promises and console.log. Unfortunately, the console object is not governed by any standard, so any JavaScript implementation can omit it or change the behavior however they want. In the past, the methods on console did not use this, so they were resilient in the face of plain invocation. That means this code sample used to work just fine:

Promise.resolve("hello world").then(console.log);

Unfortunately now calling console.log with an incorrect this value causes an illegal invocation error. Couple this with promises swallowing all errors, and you have a line of code that will print nothing and report no errors. There are two common solutions to this problem:

Promise.resolve("hello world").then(function (x) {
  console.log(x);
});

// or

Promise.resolve("hello world").then(console.log.bind(console));

Neither of those are particularly nice, and could be avoided by using a function that never used this in the first place.

Explicitly passing this

There are also two explicit ways to pass this to a function: .call and .apply. They are invoked as methods from a function, as follows:

console.log.call(console, 1, 2, 3, 4);
console.log.apply(console, [1, 2, 3, 4]);

Both lines are equivalent. The first parameter in both is the value of this to send, and then call takes the arguments normally afterward, whereas apply takes an array of arguments as its second and final parameter.

Another common workaround

The method call is used in functions like map and forEach which have optional “context” parameters (the value of this to use in the callback).

var selectors = ["p", "a", "img"];
var elems1 = selectors.map(document.querySelector, document);
var elems2 = selectors.map(document.querySelector.bind(document));

Both elems1 and elems2 contain the same values and don’t throw any errors because the value of this has been preserved correctly, by passing a value for this that the map method can use explicitly with the method call. But with elems2 we can see that context parameters are unnecessary when we have the method bind.

Strict mode behavior: New

The keyword new does quite a few things in the expression new Foo(x).

1. Let obj be a new object with no properties.

2. Set the prototype of obj to Foo.prototype.

3. Let res be the result of Foo.call(obj, x).

4. If res is an object, return res. Else return obj.

So first of all that’s quite a bit different than just calling Foo(x). This set of steps allows for code like:

function Person(name) {
  this.name = name;
}

Person.prototype.speak = function () {
  return "Hello, I am " + this.name;
};

var anika = new Person("Anika");
anika.speak(); // "Hello, I am Anika"

Notice how the function Person implicitly returns undefined (not an object) so that “else” branch of step 4 will be executed. Functions intended to be used only with new are called constructor functions.

Gotcha: Forgetting new

Most functions are called without using the keyword new in JavaScript, so it’s easy to forget. If you call a function made like the above Person without new, the value of this will be set to undefined, and this.name will throw an error.

Workaround: Not using a constructor function

Luckily, it’s actually easier to just not use new or constructor functions at all.

function createPerson(name) {
  function speak() {
    return "I am " + name;
  }
  return {
    name: name,
    speak: speak,
  };
}

var anika = createPerson("Anika");
anika.speak(); // "Hello, I am Anika"

Notice how we didn’t use this or new, so we avoid several kinds of errors for consumers of our person API.

Alternatively, we can just avoid methods all together and make a simple module that operates on plain data (such as that returned from JSON APIs):

var Person = {
  create: function (name) {
    return {
      name: name,
    };
  },
  speak: function (p) {
    return "I am " + p.name;
  },
};

var anika = Person.create("Anika");
Person.speak(anika); // "Hello, I am Anika"

Non-strict mode

When not in strict mode, this behaves a little differently. If you pass a non-object value as this, it is converted to an object. If the value is a number, string, or boolean, it’s converted to a wrapped object version. If it’s null or undefined, it’s converted to the global object (known as window or global). This makes constructor functions even more dangerous, as forgetting to use new can make them accidentally set properties on the global object (i.e. set global variables).

Note that it doesn’t matter if your code uses strict mode, it matters if the function you’re calling was written using strict mode. And because it’s opt-in, most code doesn’t use it.

Other considerations

My primary concerns with code are correctness and readability. There are performance benefits in most JavaScript engines to using particular patterns along with this and new, but that is simply not as important to me as avoiding all of its potential problems. If you are making a video game in JavaScript, this performance difference might matter, but it’s likely not your bottleneck in any other kind of application.

And if you’re thinking about prototypal inheritance, it’s equally awkward whether you use new or not, but not featured in this article for brevity.

Some say avoiding this and new is not idiomatic JavaScript. I think generally those kind of comments just mean “I don’t like it”, but in this case it’s just plain wrong. Consider document.createElement("div") or $("div.foo"), both plain functions that hide away any internal details about new.

Safer, easier JavaScript

As you’ve seen, the behavior of this and new is nothing magical, but both both constructs are more error prone than they need to be. Luckily, JavaScript is a powerful enough language that we do not need either of those features to do object-oriented programming. Don’t let anyone shame you into thinking you’re doing JavaScript “wrong” or you’re not “harnessing the power of prototypes” if you want to write your code this way. Good luck, and have fun writing JavaScript with two dangerous tools out of your way.