Scripting - Compiler - Class Initializers

[vurvdev]

JavaScript and Typescript traditionally use constructors like this

class Car {
    make: string;

    constructor(make: string) {
        this.make = make;
    }
}

class Toyota extends Car {
    model: string;

    constructor(make: string, model: string) {
        super(make);
        this.model = model;
    }
}

I have problems with this:

1. Quite ugly and verbose
2. It's quite hacky on the type system
3. There's a default constructor, and you can even elide setting fields by setting them to readonly?? It isn't intuitive at all

I would prefer something that allowed us to create structs or classes that simply defined the data required, and allow you to create them. Any abstractions over that would be opt-in as generic static methods.

This was going to exist in E2 in the form of structs, I already implemented it. This was the syntax:

struct car {
    make: string;
}

const Toyota = car { make = "test" }

This could be abstracted away by having some constructor static function ala Rust, if you'd like.

function car:new(Make:string) {
    return car { make = Make }
}

No constructor or anything special needed. This works great because you clearly see which fields are needed, and for simple POD types you don't need to write a whole constructor.

Other languages than Rust do this, C# has object initialization syntax, and C++ has it too. Of course this is the same as a C struct, although I wanted to mention the other object oriented languages first.

[vurvdev]

Accepted syntax:

struct Foo {
    bar: number;

    static new() {
        return Foo { bar: 5 };
    }
}

const foo = Foo.new();

This is a middle ground between TS, Rust, Zig and the original vision for E2 structs which I think is simplest.