fixes #1966: external constructors should produce their return value

[michaelficarra]

I'm not 100% on this, but it seems better than the alternative, which would be to treat the return value of already-defined functions differently when pointed to as an external constructor.

edit: I'm pretty comfortable with it now. See my comment below.

[TrevorBurnham]

Yikes, new A not instanceof A? Why allow external constructors at all?

[michaelficarra]

class A then constructor: -> return {}
ctor = -> {}
class B then constructor: ctor
(new A) not instanceof A # yep
(new B) not instanceof B # same result

That's not undesirable behaviour. It's consistent. The class syntax is just a sugar for adding prototype properties in an IIFE. Which constructor we're talking about is specified with the special constructor key. There's three options:

• omit it, the compiler will make an empty one for us
• give it a function literal, compiler will ignore implicit returns
• give it a reference/expression
  • currently, we save the referenced/generated function, but always ignore its return value
  • this proposed change will cause the constructor to behave more like we're actually using that function as the constructor

[jnicklas]

If this patch is accepted both returning the new instance, and returning something else (which is useful) would be possible, since we can still return this from the dynamically assigned constructor function. So I would say that this is more flexible than the current behavior. However, it is an API breaking change, which is somewhat unfortunate.

[rymohr]

Thanks Michael. Your solution is much more elegant. Wasn't aware of the makeReturn() method.

I actually saw this pull request before but found the test case hard to decipher so I thought I'd take a stab at it, if only to clarify why this behavior is desirable.

With this modification, adding an identity map to Backbone is just a few lines of code when all other solutions I've seen are forced to duplicate Backbone.Model instead of extend it.

[michaelficarra]

@islandr: glad it will help you.

[jnicklas]

Identity map is the exakt use case I've been toying around with this as well, thank you for merging, will have to play with it and see how it works now!

[michaelficarra]

@jnicklas: It hasn't been merged yet. I'm waiting for approval from @jashkenas and hopefully @TrevorBurnham will come around.

[jashkenas]

Yep -- thanks for the pull req.

[rymohr]

Awesome. Thanks guys!