Introduction

In JavaScript, there is a topic that is very difficult for beginners and even experienced developers to fully understand: “What is this?”. As a front-end engineer who uses JavaScript as a tool for a living, I have been struggling with this issue for a long time.

I originally thought that I would never write an article about this.

There are two reasons for this. First, there are already a lot of articles explaining this topic, and each one is written very well. After reading the What’s THIS in JavaScript ? series, I felt that the explanation was very complete. If I am not confident that I can explain it more clearly or from a different perspective, it seems unnecessary to write another article. The second reason is that if you want to “completely” understand this, the cost may be much higher than you think.

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Introduction

Please forgive me for using a somewhat sensational title, because I really can’t think of any other title that is better. In the end, I chose a controversial title, but it is also interesting to use such a title to stimulate discussion. Moreover, what I said is based on facts.

Before reading this article, please read the previous article: I know you understand hoisting, but do you understand it deeply?, because the content of the article is partly related, so you must have the concept of Execution Context and Variable Object before you can absorb the content of this article.

If you are only interested in the sentence in the article title: “All Functions are Closures”, you can scroll down directly, because to talk about closures, we must start with scope, so this article will not be too short according to convention, and there will be a certain degree of elaboration in the front.

Okay, let’s start with scope.

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Preface

Supplement on June 9, 2021:

Thanks to the reader blackr1234 for leaving a comment. This article was published in November 2018, and the output results of the code below are probably based on Node.js v8.17.0, so the output of some situations may be different from now. For example, accessing the let variable before declaration, the result at that time was: ReferenceError: a is not defined, and the result using Node.js v14 now is: ReferenceError: Cannot access 'a' before initialization.

Recently, I have been busy with some teaching-related things, and after preparing some materials, I taught my students about hoisting in JavaScript, which is the concept of “lifting”. For example, the following code:

console.log(a)
var a = 10

will output undefined instead of ReferenceError: a is not defined. This phenomenon is called Hoisting, and the declaration of the variable is “lifted” to the top.

If you only want to understand the basics of hoisting, it’s almost like this, but later I also taught some knowledge related to let and const. However, the day before I just finished teaching, the next day I immediately saw a related technical article and found that I had taught it wrong. Therefore, I spent some time planning to understand hoisting well.

Many things may not seem like much before you delve into them. You will find that you still have a lot of concepts that you don’t understand when you really jump in and look deeply.

Many people know hoisting, but the degree of understanding is different. I have listed 10 items. If you don’t know any of them, congratulations, this article should bring you some gains.

1. You know what hoisting is
2. You know that hoisting only lifts declarations, not assignments
3. You know the priority of hoisting when function declarations, function parameters, and general variable declarations appear at the same time
4. You know that let and const do not have hoisting
5. You know that the fourth point is wrong, in fact, there is hoisting, but the expression is different
6. You know that there is a concept called TDZ (Temporal Dead Zone) related to the fifth point
7. You have read the ES3 specification and know how it is described inside
8. You have read the ES6 specification and know how it is described inside
9. You know the principle behind hoisting
10. You have seen the code compiled by V8

You may ask, “Why do I need to know so deeply? What’s the use?” In fact, I also think that for hoisting, it is enough to know the basics. As long as you declare variables properly, even if you don’t know those, it will not have much impact on daily life or work.

But if you, like me, want to put “proficient in JavaScript” on your resume one day, you cannot escape these things. At the same time, if you are more familiar with these underlying details, you will encounter fewer problems, and you will also understand why hoisting appears. When you want to go further and climb higher on the technical road, I think these details are very important.

Next, let’s take a look at hoisting step by step!

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Introduction

Originally, I was planning to write about the differences and implementations of shallow and deep copying. However, while researching, I stumbled upon articles related to call by value and call by reference, and the more I delved into it, the more interesting it became. I thought I had understood this issue, but the more I read, the more confused I became.

There are two ways to write this article. One is to record in detail my process of researching this issue, my doubts, and how I arrived at a solution, essentially writing in chronological order. The other is to organize my findings and express them in a simpler and more understandable way.

In the past, I have mostly taken the second approach, reorganizing and summarizing my findings to write an article that is relatively easy to understand, leading readers step by step through my thought process to arrive at a solution.

However, this time I want to try the first approach, taking readers through the materials I usually read when writing articles and explaining my thought process. This should be quite interesting.

Let’s go!

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Introduction

To be honest, the prototype chain in JavaScript has always been a topic that I am afraid of. The reason is simple, it is really difficult to understand. Just a bunch of terms and complex relationships can drive you crazy, such as prototype, __proto__, constructor, Object.prototype, Function.prototype, new, etc.

However, this is indeed a very important part of JavaScript and a must-have question for interviews. Even if you don’t understand it now, you will eventually have to understand it someday, otherwise you will never be able to improve your technical skills.

There are many articles about the prototype chain that you can find on the internet, and each one has a different way of understanding it. Some of them directly use a lot of technical terms, which can scare you to death. It wasn’t until recently that I read a few articles that I thought had a better perspective, that I truly understood the prototype chain.

So, let’s take this opportunity to learn more about the prototype chain in JavaScript! This article is suitable for those who have a basic understanding of JavaScript but are not very clear about it. If there are any mistakes in the article, please feel free to point them out in the comments. Thank you.

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In JavaScript, there is a super important concept called asynchronous, which is also the easiest concept to confuse and forget when you first start learning. ES6 natively supports Promise, which works better with Generator, and ES7 even supports the syntax of async. I think this is an evolutionary process that makes the program architecture better and more readable. So to explain these new things, let’s start with the most basic callback.

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