Understanding 'new' in JS

One of the things that confused me most when starting out with Javascript was constructor functions. That’s because when used together with new they look like a normal class in other langues.

const instance = new Constructor()

However, they can also be called without the new keyword which will lead to this pointing to the global object instead. The new ES6 class keyword fixes that by throwing an exception when called without new.

So what does new do anyway?

After some research it seems we can simply implement our own new as a function like this:

function myNew(constructor, ...args) {
	const newObj = {}
	newObj.__proto__ = constructor.prototype
	const fromConstructor = constructor.apply(newObj, args)
	if (fromConstructor) {
		return fromConstructor
	}
	return newObj
}

New is simply responsible for:

1. Creating a new object
2. Set it’s prototype to that of the constructors prototype property
3. Call the constructor with this bound to the newly created object.
4. As constructors in Javascript are allowed to return a different object, new also needs to check if it did and return that instead when that’s the case.