Axel Rauschmayer wrote:
It would be great if we could eliminate these predicates completely.
How often does the frame crossing problem matter in practice? It
doesn’t show up in non-browser environments, right?
Those matter but not so much. I know, Node.js -- I'm a fan. But really,
we have a large user base that does, I'm told, often enough face the
problem that !(someArrayFromAnotherWindow instanceof Array).
I see several possibilities:
- Make instanceof work correctly with objects that have crossed frames.
We can't do this. It will break code that knows how instanceof works --
by walking the prototype chain. There's no magic here, either, unless
you want this cross-frame equivalence to apply only to built-ins, based
on some internal nominal tag (such as the identiy of the code pointer
for the two frames' Array constructors).
- Introduce a binary predicate, e.g. likeInstanceOf that correctly
handles cases where the lhs and rhs come from different contexts/frames.
Again, how? The name of the constructor in one frame may not be relevant
in the other. The constructor may not be a built-in. Are you thinking in
nominal type terms again? :-/
Additionally, one could throw an exception if there is an instanceof
check whose lhs and rhs are from different contexts (failing fast,
preventing obscure and hard-to-debug errors).
This too would be an incompatible change. I don't see any upside in
messing with instanceof, and it has its uses (if only in Node.js :-).
/be
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