I'll bet that most of time that non-initialized values bite me is when I'm
checking if a member variable is null or not. I frequently rely on the fact
that Object, String, and most classes default to null, and then I do
something like this:
if(this._myVar === null)
{
}
I dread the day I need to go in and initialize a ton of variables that
didn't need to be initialized before (across hundreds of classes). Even
with this new option, if I port an open source library like Feathers, I'm
not going to force everyone who uses it to add
-js-default-initializers=true to their project's compiler options when they
want to add my library's source code to their project. That would be a bad
user experience. I've started trying to manually initialize to null when I
add new member variables to Feathers with the idea that this might be
required someday, but there's still a ton of existing code that will take a
very long time for me to update.
I wonder if there's some value in initializing only member variables, and
not locals (which I don't usually declare without initializing them). That
seems like it could be confusing, though. Or maybe null is worth
considering as a special case that's always initialized too. It seems
pretty very difficult to get the best of both worlds here.
- Josh
On Tue, Aug 1, 2017 at 3:31 PM, Harbs <harbs.li...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I’d prefer if we could somehow get the best of both worlds.
>
> I don’t see a solution to that dilemma at the moment, but maybe we’ll come
> up with something...
>
> Harbs
>
> > On Aug 2, 2017, at 1:24 AM, Josh Tynjala <joshtynj...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Don't get me wrong. If you see value in it, then we definitely shouldn't
> > remove it as an option. However, for compatibility with the existing
> > language, I'd prefer to see initialization be the default instead.
> >
> > - Josh
> >
> > On Tue, Aug 1, 2017 at 3:14 PM, Harbs <harbs.li...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Any maybe vice versa... ;-p
> >>
> >> Alex was planning on looking into whether he can solve the boolean
> >> problem, so let’s hold off until he does that.
> >>
> >> I think comparing two booleans is pretty rare although I have already
> run
> >> into if(myBool == false) not working. Changing it to if(!myBool) was
> simple
> >> enough, but I do agree with you that it’s currently broken.
> >>
> >> For now, we’re going to have to agree to disagree on initializing
> values.
> >> I’ve seen a lot of value in leaving them undefined. It makes it really
> >> clear while debugging whether the value has been set or not.
> >>
> >> Harbs
> >>
> >>> On Aug 2, 2017, at 12:54 AM, Josh Tynjala <joshtynj...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Maybe I'll convince others eventually.
> >>
> >>
>
>
