What's the point of keeping EventEmitter.init?

[dead-claudia]

[This particular method, EventEmitter.init(https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/lib/events.js#L42-L58) is effectively the constructor method for EventEmitter (up to and including requiring this to be an event emitter itself), and is completely undocumented. I personally don't see much of a use case for keeping it a separate thing outside parasitically inheriting when you're already extending a non-emitter class (not common). I'm thinking it could either be moved into a static function (i.e. no this) or just removed altogether, since it's really redundant, and I've never seen it used elsewhere in practice.

[mscdex]

By git bisecting you can see when/why the change was made. In this particular case, it was added in 54da818, with the original PR being nodejs/node-v0.x-archive#6693.

The simple answer is that it was added to allow monkey-patching of the EventEmitter constructor, because at least at that time there were (and there may still be) people taking advantage of that ability.

[benjamingr]

I'm -1 on removing it, breaking compatibility (even with things that are undocumented!) should be done when/if there is a clear benefit in doing so.

While it's not great to have undocumented methods it's practically free to keep around and it does not risk breaking code in the wild.

[addaleax]

I think the original question here has been answered, so I’m closing this. If there’s need for more discussion, or if you have any follow-up questions, feel free to ask. :)