How "bad" is this constructor really?

Question

While following a HTML5 rocks web audio tutorial JSHint gives this warning...

W056 - Bad constructor.at line 26 col 73

For the following line...

var audioContext = new (window.AudioContext || window.webkitAudioContext)();

The JSHint docs explain the warning is issued whenever new is used with an object literal and go on to say that new "is only useful for creating instances of a constructor function and has no sensible meaning when applied to non-function objects or literals."

This strikes me as a reasonable use though, it's succinct and it's pretty obvious what it's doing. I'm therefore minded to throw in an ignore directive /*jshint -W056 */ but I thought I'd ask in case I'm missing something.

So, am I missing something?

Answer 1

The message you're getting doesn't match the code. New is used with a constructor function. JSHint probably can't tell this though because of the complex expression it's coming from. So it's wrong about there being no sensible meaning.