I am currently working on a project that was written before es6 classes were a thing and therefor uses a class creation function for all of its classes.

I am using VSCode and thought, it would be nice to use some IntelliSense, so that instances show their methods, the parameters and return types, and so on, therefor I documented them using JSDoc.

I quickly found out that JSDoc allows Documentation of pre-es6-classes. The docs nearly include my problem, see jsdoc tag documentation: @lends. The given example shows the following:

/** @class */
var Person = makeClass(
    /** @lends Person.prototype */
    {
        /**
         * Create a `Person` instance.
         * @param {string} name - The person's name.
         */
        initialize: function(name) {
            this.name = name;
        },
        /**
         * Say something.
         * @param {string} message - The message to say.
         * @returns {string} The complete message.
         */
        say: function(message) {
            return this.name + " says: " + message;
        }
    }
);

Yet, when I copy-paste this example into an empty javascript file and add another line below, like

var p = new Person("");
p.say("")

My editor, VSCode, does no intellisense-hinting for p.say, the parameter message (which isn't recognized at all) and p and var Person is shown as type: any . I would have expected that p would have the type Person and that intellisense recognizes the class with its methods. Why isn't this the case, what am I doing wrong?

I already tried to add @type Person or some other tags, but I would like to avoid having a separate file like .d.ts just for type hinting or separating "documentation" and code to much. The documentation of a function foobar(foo, bar){ ... } with jsdoc works and type hinting is shown, but keeping the type information after variable assignments seem to be a problem.

(Obviously: Changing the entire project to a newer javascript version or even typescript is not an option.)

Thanks for any help in advance!