Question

I recently watched Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript presentations, where he raves about JavaScript prototype inheritance as if it is the best thing since sliced white bread. Considering Crockford’s reputation, it may very well be.

Can someone please tell me what is the downside of JavaScript prototype inheritance? (compared to class inheritance in C# or Java, for example)

Answer 1

Things I miss when sub-classing an existing object in Javascript vs. inheriting from a class in C++:

1. No standard (built-into-the-language) way of writing it that looks the same no matter which developer wrote it.
2. Writing your code doesn’t naturally produce an interface definition the way the class header file does in C++.
3. There’s no standard way to do protected and private member variables or methods. There are some conventions for some things, but again different developers do it differently.
4. There’s no compiler step to tell you when you’ve made foolish typing mistakes in your definition.
5. There’s no type-safety when you want it.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a zillion advantages to the way javascript prototype inheritance works vs C++, but these are some of the places where I find javascript works less smoothly.

4 and 5 are not strictly related to prototype inheritance, but they come into play when you have a significant sized project with many modules, many classes and lots of files and you wish to refactor some classes. In C++, you can change the classes, change as many callers as you can find and then let the compiler find all the remaining references for you that need fixing. If you’ve added parameters, changed types, changed method names, moved methods,etc… the compiler will show you were you need to fix things.

In Javascript, there is no easy way to discover all possible pieces of code that need to be changed without literally executing every possible code path to see if you’ve missed something or made some typo. While this is a general disadvantage of javascript, I’ve found it particularly comes into play when refactoring existing classes in a significant-sized project. I’ve come near the end of a release cycle in a significant-sized JS project and decided that I should NOT do any refactoring to fix a problem (even though that was the better solution) because the risk of not finding all possible ramifications of that change was much higher in JS than C++.

So, consequently, I find it’s riskier to make some types of OO-related changes in a JS project.