javascript - How should you inherit from EventEmitter in node?

Question

I was reading over this small article to understand inheriting from EventEmitter, but I'm a little confused.

He does this:

function Door() {
    events.EventEmitter.call(this);
    this.open = function() {
        this.emit('open');
    };
}
Door.prototype.__proto__ = events.EventEmitter.prototype;

https://gist.github.com/chevex/7646362

Why does he manually invoke the EventEmitter constructor with his own constructor's this? Also, why does he set the prototype of his contsructor's prototype to the prototype of EventEmitter? That's super confusing to me.

Then someone in the comments suggested he do this instead, which seemed more elegant:

function Door() {
    events.EventEmitter.call(this);
    this.open = function () {
      this.emit('open');
    }
}
util.inherits(Door, events.EventEmitter);

https://gist.github.com/chevex/7646447

This seems WAY cleaner than the other way, though that's probably just because I fail to understand what's going on in the first instance. I would not be surprised if util.inherits is doing the same thing as the first example.

The second one at least makes a little sense to me, but I still don't understand why they don't just do this:

function Door() {
    this.open = function () {
      this.emit('open');
    }
}
Door.prototype = new events.EventEmitter();

https://gist.github.com/chevex/7646524

Can anyone explain to me what the differences between all of these approaches is and why in the first two they invoke .call(this) on the EventEmitter constructor? I omitted that line while trying out the examples and they still worked.

Answer 1

The third example is not generally correct: that creates one single EventEmitter instance for all door instances.

Let's imagine a simple case:

var Foo = function() {
    // each Foo instance has a unique id
    this.id = Math.random();
}
Foo.prototype.doFoo = function() { console.log("Foo!"); }

Suppose we want to create a Bar constructor that inherits from Foo and adds some new properties. If you follow your final example:

var Bar = function() {
    this.something = 5;
}
Bar.prototype = new Foo();

This is wrong because all Bar instance will have the same id property. Instead, we must call the parent constructor for each instance:

var Bar = function() {
    Foo.call(this);  // set unique `id` on `this`
    this.something = 5;
}
Bar.prototype = Object.create(Foo.prototype);

Note that the final line here is the same as Bar.prototype.__proto__ = Foo.prototype; because Object.create creates a new object whose __proto__ is set to the Object.create argument.