callable-object

Ever find yourself missing Python's __call__ or PHP's __invoke? Me too.

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Usage
  • Override __call__
  • Object factory
  • Factory with hidden function
• How it works
• Performance
  • Object creation
  • Invocation
  • Interpretation
• API
• License: MIT

Installation ↑

npm install callable-object

Usage ↑

const callable = require("callable-object");


class Test {
    constructor(name) {
        this.name = name;
    },
    __call__(arg) {
        return `${arg} from ${this.name}`;
    }
}


const foo = callable(Test, "foo");
const bar = callable(Test, "bar");

console.log(foo("hello"));
console.log(bar("hello"));
console.log(foo("goodbye"));
console.log(bar("goodbye"));

Will print out:

hello from foo
hello from bar
goodbye from foo
goodbye from bar

Override __call__ ↑

callable.method = "whatAreYouNutsThereAreNoUnderscoresInJavascript";


class Test {
    whatAreYouNutsThereAreNoUnderscoresInJavascript() {
        return "hello world";
    }
}


console.log(callable(Test)());  // hello world

Object factory ↑

class LazyNumber {
    construct(value) {
        this.value = value;
    },
    invoke() {
        return this.value;
    }
}


LazyNumberFactory = callable.factory(LazyNumber, "invoke");


const answerToLifeTheUniverseAndEverything = LazyNumberFactory(42);
const squareRootOfNine = new LazyNumberFactory(3); // new is optional

console.log(answerToLifeTheUniverseAndEverything()); // 42
console.log(squareRootOfNine()); // 3

Factory with hidden function ↑

function LazyNumber(value) {
    this.value = value;
}


LazyNumberFactory = callable.factory(LazyNumber, function() {
    return this.value;
})

How it works ↑

It works by creating a function that proxies to this.__call__ (or wherever), changing said function's prototype then invokes the constructor on it. This has a few limitations:

1. It requires either setPrototypeOf or __proto__, so IE11, EDGE and recent versions of the evergreens only (oh, and of course Node.JS)
2. Since it expects the constructor to mutate this (which is a function), it does not support the part of the JS spec where a constructor may return a new object that will be used in favor of this when returning to the caller. Ironically, the implementation itself uses this part of the spec to support the new callable() syntax.
3. Due to the way JS engines currently optimize the code, setPrototypeOf is rather slow. Not slow enough to discourage usage, but maybe don't create new callable objects in your critical code paths.

Performance ↑

Results were measured on a Intel i7-2600 @ 3.4GHz with 16GB of DDR3-1600 CL9 under Node.JS v4.2.6. Throughput numbers are expressed in operations per second (ops).

Object creation ↑

No constructor arguments

| Test description | Throughput | Error | Percent of best | | ---------------------- | ---------: | -----: | --------------: | | new Class() | 22,510,357 | ±0.83% | 100.00% | | Object.create(Class::) | 7,227,079 | ±1.07% | 32.11% | | callable(Class) | 82,981 | ±3.20% | 0.37% | | ClassFactory() | 84,268 | ±3.59% | 0.37% | | new ClassFactory() | 86,179 | ±3.15% | 0.38% |

5 constructor arguments

| Test description | Throughput | Error | Percent of best | | ---------------------- | ---------: | -----: | --------------: | | new Class() | 17,069,221 | ±0.63% | 100.00% | | Object.create(Class::) | 6,365,882 | ±1.05% | 37.29% | | callable(Class) | 67,656 | ±1.92% | 0.40% | | ClassFactory() | 88,792 | ±2.64% | 0.52% | | new ClassFactory() | 87,260 | ±2.83% | 0.51% |

10 constructor arguments

| Test description | Throughput | Error | Percent of best | | ---------------------- | ---------: | -----: | --------------: | | new Class() | 14,578,849 | ±1.24% | 100.00% | | Object.create(Class::) | 6,041,883 | ±1.09% | 41.44% | | callable(Class) | 64,257 | ±1.84% | 0.44% | | ClassFactory() | 88,469 | ±2.39% | 0.61% | | new ClassFactory() | 87,123 | ±2.73% | 0.60% |

Invocation ↑

No arguments

| Test description | Throughput | Error | Percent of best | | ---------------------- | ---------: | -----: | --------------: | | instance.baz() | 36,369,977 | ±0.47% | 100.00% | | instance() | 27,966,934 | ±1.30% | 76.90% |

5 arguments

| Test description | Throughput | Error | Percent of best | | ---------------------- | ---------: | -----: | --------------: | | instance.baz() | 26,831,639 | ±0.60% | 100.00% | | instance() | 22,229,576 | ±0.82% | 82.85% |

10 arguments

| Test description | Throughput | Error | Percent of best | | ---------------------- | ---------: | -----: | --------------: | | instance.baz() | 22,671,310 | ±0.78% | 100.00% | | instance() | 20,173,956 | ±0.79% | 88.98% |

Interpretation ↑

While the object creation performance is abysmal by most standards (200x slowdown), the nature of the benchmark needs to be taken into account: the test created an object and called its constructor, which stored the arguments it was called with (so that the JIT can't optimize them out).

As the number of arguments (and thus the total amount of work performed by the benchmark) increased, the throughput started dropping, whereas the throughput of creating instances of callable classes remained relatively constant, signaling that most of the time was spent with the object creation itself and not running constructor code. As such, this 200x slowdown can be considered a worst-case scenario, with real worlds results most likely being closer to 10x - 50x due to the extra work generally performed by the constructor.

With regards to the invocation itself, a similar trend is noticeable but with the performance difference essentially becoming negligible as the amount of useful work performed by the function itself increases.

API ↑

callable(ctor, [args...])

Returns a callable object from ctor using the default behavior.

The default behavior is to invoke a method called __call__ on the newly created object whenever it is called as a function. This can be changed by assigning a different value to the method property of this module. Doing that of course comes with a "if you break it, you get to keep all the little pieces" guarantee.

Any additional arguments are sent to ctor.

callable.Callable(ctor, method = null, args = [])

Creates a new callable object.

Creates a new function that is updated to behave as if it was the result of a call to new ctor(args...) with the extra twist that any calls will be intercepted and forwarded to obj[method] OR directly to method if it is a function.

args will be sent directly to ctor, which will be called in the new object's context prior to returning.

WARNING the result of ctor is ignored. While this shouldn't affect most people, this is technically against the spec as returning an object from a constructor invoked with new should override the object that was created and passed as the function's context.

callable.factory(ctor, method = null)

Creates a new callable factory with specific behavior.

Returns a function that can be called in lieu of a constructor (can even use new) to return instances of ctor that will invoke method when they are called as a function. If method is not provided, it will use the global default

License ↑

callable-object is licensed under the MIT license.