Constructors & apply
asx has gained a new feature: newInstance(klass:Class, parameters:Array).
It does exactly what it looks like – creates a new instance of a class passing in the given parameters to the constructor.
var event:Event = newInstance(Event, ["click", true, false]);
Perhaps not so useful for Event, however when dependency injection starts calling it becomes an issue to support injecting values in constructors.
ActionScript 3 has changed enough from AS2 that its no longer possible to treat constructors as functions and call apply() on them with our required parameters. (This example might be a little bit off as I haven’t written AS2 for years, apply might have to be called on the prototype).
var event = Event.apply(null, ["click", true, false]);
Instead of a nice terse one-liner to invoke a constructor with an array of parameters AS3 requires us to do this hideous business:
public function newInstance(klass:Class, args:Array=null):Object {
args = args || [];
switch (args.length) {
case 0: { return new klass(); }
case 1: { return new klass(args[0]); }
case 2: { return new klass(args[0], args[1]); }
case 3: { return new klass(args[0], args[1], args[2]); }
// ... ad infinitum for as many arguments as you want to support
}
}
And I would like to share why.
AS3 gets compiled by mxmlc into bytecode. Bytecode is a way to represent the operations of code in a small and efficient to execute manner. The bytecode operation that constructs a new instance is called construct.
This bytecode expects the next value in the bytecode to be the number of parameters to pass to the constructor. These parameters must already exist on the stack (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_(data_structure)). Items on the stack are references to Arrays, Booleans, Numbers, Class instances etc.
It is not possible for the bytecode for construct to say:
“use the (number of) items in the array at the top of the stack as my parameters”.
And so unless a new bytecode operation is added to the AVM2 we must continue to use code similar to the epic switch statement given above.
newInstance() is available in asx and is taken from my work on implementing dependency injection containers, and an AS3 bytecode generator. Similar solutions exist in Prana/Spring ActionScript and other DI frameworks.