[chongli]

I think the word ‘natural’ in this context is too vague. If you’re coming to Rust from C++, sure, Rust’s closures feel quite natural. If, on the other hand, you’re coming to Rust from Haskell then they’ll feel wholly unnatural and confusing.

[burntsushi]

Sure it's vague. We're expressing opinions here. :-) But it's important to push back here. Closures are absolutely natural enough in Rust that a huge swath of very fundamental APIs in Rust rely on them. If they weren't natural in at least some sense, it would be absolutely bonkers to do that.

I came to Rust from Haskell (among other languages). I was a little confused by closures, but I attributed that to the fact that I started writing Rust before 1.0 when closures were far far far less convenient than they are today. (This is back when there were 'proc' closures.) Now I find them extremely natural.

[chongli]

Wait, they got rid of proc closures? Hahaha. Shows how long it’s been since I last looked at Rust. Okay, now they do look quite natural!

[burntsushi]

Indeed. My (and by no means am I the only one) mental model of closures is really simple. A closure is a struct with no name, and the free variables of the closure are fields in the struct. If the closure is annotated with 'move', then those fields are owned, otherwise the fields are borrowed and the lifetime parameter on the struct is the shortest of the bunch. Then, calling the closure is just calling it with 'self' (FnOnce), '&self' (Fn) or '&mut self' (FnMut).

Everything else pretty much falls into place.

The other thing that was added since you've looked at Rust is that you can return unboxed closures because Rust has gained the ability to express anonymous types directly by naming a trait it implements:

    fn adder(x: i32) -> impl Fn(i32) -> i32 {
        move |y| y + x
    }

    fn main() {
        let add2 = adder(2);
        assert_eq!(7, add2(5));
        assert_eq!(10, add2(8));
    }

[Hirrolot]

Your example indeed perfectly demonstrates the subtlety of closures in Rust. Now let's imagine I want to return a nested closure, e.g., `impl Fn(i32) -> impl Fn(i32) -> i32`, or something like that:

    fn adder(x: i32) -> impl Fn(i32) -> impl Fn(i32) -> i32 {
        move |y| move |z| y + x + z
    }

Alright, I can't. I can do that for a single closure, but can't for two or more of them. Here's why we have `#![feature(impl_trait_in_fn_trait_return)]` -- in Nightly, among many other such features.

[burntsushi]

My example didn't demonstrate the subtlety here, but it inspired your example, which of course does demonstrate some subtlety. And as I acknowledged in another comment, I of course agree there are subtleties to closures in Rust! And I agree there are useful nightly features that unlock additional use cases. Rust gives you enough rope to hang yourself with. For example, if you're okay with a heap allocation (like I assume you might be in a language with "non-broken closures" lol), then you don't need nightly Rust:

    fn adder(x: i32) -> impl Fn(i32) -> Box<dyn Fn(i32) -> i32> {
        move |y| Box::new(move |z| y + x + z)
    }

    fn main() {
        let add23 = adder(2)(3);
        assert_eq!(10, add23(5));
        assert_eq!(13, add23(8));
    }

It's almost like "fundamentally broken" (not just "broken" but "fundamentally broken") and "has subtlety" are two totally different things. What a fucking revelation.

[chongli]

That’s really nice. One of my favourite uses for returning closures is to separate a function into ‘configuration’ and ‘execution’ stages. It becomes extremely useful when you have a ton of parameters but only a few change between typical invocations.