Why would you ever call .call() on Observable functions?

Question

I am a relative beginner in Angular, and I am struggling to understand some source I am reading from the ng-bootstrap project. The source code can be found here.

I am very confused by the code in ngOnInit:

ngOnInit(): void {
    const inputValues$ = _do.call(this._valueChanges, value => {
      this._userInput = value;
      if (this.editable) {
        this._onChange(value);
      }
    });
    const results$ = letProto.call(inputValues$, this.ngbTypeahead);
    const processedResults$ = _do.call(results$, () => {
      if (!this.editable) {
        this._onChange(undefined);
      }
    });
    const userInput$ = switchMap.call(this._resubscribeTypeahead, () => processedResults$);
    this._subscription = this._subscribeToUserInput(userInput$);
  }

What is the point of calling .call(...) on these Observable functions? What kind of behaviour is this trying to achieve? Is this a normal pattern?

I've done a lot of reading/watching about Observables (no pun intended) as part of my Angular education but I have never come across anything like this. Any explanation would be appreciated

Answer 1

My personal opinion is that they were using this for RxJS prior 5.5 which introduced lettable operators. The same style is used internally by Angular. For example: https://github.com/angular/angular/blob/master/packages/router/src/router_preloader.ts#L91.

The reason for this is that by default they would have to patch the Observable class with rxjs/add/operators/XXX. The disadvantage of this is that some 3rd party library is modifying a global object that might unexpectedly cause problems somewhere else in your app. See https://github.com/ReactiveX/rxjs/blob/master/doc/lettable-operators.md#why.

You can see at the beginning of the file that they import each operator separately https://github.com/ng-bootstrap/ng-bootstrap/blob/master/src/typeahead/typeahead.ts#L22-L25.

So by using .call() they can use any operator and still avoid patching the Observable class.