I was doing a little reading up on OOP in JavaScript and was learning a bit about using the prototype object. In this article (a very good read, btw), the author says the following regarding declaring methods as attributes of a JavaScript class versus declaring the method on the prototype of the class:
This is actually not the optimal way to do it. A better way is to define the method on Person.prototype. Why is this better? Anyone? Anyone? Beuller? In the first version, each time you create a person, a new sayHi function will be created for him, where as in the second version, only one sayHi function is ever created, and is shared amongst all persons that are created - because Person.prototype is their parent. Thus, declaring methods on the prototype is more memory efficient.
After reading this, I began to thing about a JavaScript framework that I occasionally use to ease OOP with the language, Classy. In the examples given in their documents, and in pretty much all Classy code that I've ever written, I always declared the methods of a class directly as an attribute of it (as in right between the curly brackets instead of outside). I realize that directly declaring a method of a Classy class is done via object notation (JSON) instead of a normal JavaScript class having methods added directly inside of the function of the class.
What I am wondering is if objects created with Classy already take advantage of the performance savings of a method declared against a class's prototype. If I declare class methods in the same way as Classy's documentation, are the methods declared per instance of the class or declared as one method for all instances of the class to share? If the former, then am I able to, or supposed to, declare methods in a Classy class's prototype?
Sorry if I sound confusing.