chill-patch: Stress-free Monkey Patching for JavaScript

chill-patch enables you to add methods to JS classes, with none of the problems of traditional monkey-patching.

const chillPatch = require('chill-patch')
const lastFunc = arr => arr[arr.length - 1]
const array = [1, 2, 3]

// safely add a method to `Array`
const last = chillPatch(Array, lastFunc, 'last')

// call the new method!
array[last]() //=> 3

You can use chill-patch to use off-the-shelf this-less functions as methods:

// Using toggle-set without chill-patch
const toggleSet = require('toggle-set')
const set = new Set([1, 2, 3])

toggleSet(set, 1) // Set([2, 3])

// Using toggle-set with chill-patch
const toggle = chillPatch(Set, toggleSet)

set[toggle](4) // Set([1, 2, 3, 4])

Install

npm install chill-patch

Uses

• Method-chaining-style syntax:

// can adapt functions like this:
func3(func2(func1(instance)))

// and chain them like this:

instance
    [func1]()
    [func2]()
    [func3]()

// which is very similar to method chaining
instance
    .method1()
    .method2()
    .method3()

• testing

const chillPatch = require('chill-patch')
const should = chillPatch(Object, require('should/as-function'))
const foo = {a: 2}
foo[should]().deepEqual({a: 2}) // succeeds
foo[should]().deepEqual({a: 3}) // fails

API

chillPatch(Klass, func, optionalDescription)

• Klass is an ES5-style or ES2015-style class
• func is a function with any number of arguments
• optionalDescription is used as the description of the symbol.

Why it's Safe

chill-patch is safe because the return value is a Symbol and symbols are guaranteed to be unique. That means that the only way to access the new method you created is to have access to the symbol.

The only way another programmer can get access to symbols on an object in another scope is if they are hellbent on doing so, in which case they know they are going off-roading.

When you add a property to a prototype using a symbol, it's hidden, so you can safely pass off the patched object to other parts of the codebase, without other programmers knowing its there or being affected by it.

// after the above code is run, there is no change to the `ownPropertyNames` of the patched class

Object.getOwnPropertyNames(Array.prototype) // doesn't include anything new!

Similar Tech in other Languages

• Scala Implicit Conversions

• Objective-C Categories

• Haskell Typeclasses and Rust Traits

• Nim method call syntax

Something Better

The JavaScript Pipeline Operator proposal accomplishes the same syntactic convenience more simply and elegantly. The following two expressions would be equivalent:

let result = exclaim(capitalize(doubleSay("hello")));
result //=> "Hello, hello!"

let result = "hello"
  |> doubleSay
  |> capitalize
  |> exclaim;

result //=> "Hello, hello!"

from the pipeline operator proposal

The Pipeline Operator is from F#, is also implemented in Elm and is similar to Clojure's threading macro.