[thayne]

Rust closures can have lifetimes, and the lifetime of a closure is restricted to the lifetime of the shortest lived reference that it captures. But that just means the compiler protects you from having dangling pointers in your closure. And I don't think you can get much better than that without a runtime garbage collector.

[kibwen]

A Rust closure "has" a lifetime in the sense that the anonymous underlying struct that Rust creates to hold the closed-over values has a lifetime, but that's not a requirement to have closures without a GC. Like C++, Odin doesn't care about being memory-safe, so you can just say "be careful doing anything that involves pointers" (which is how the language already works), or if you wanted to be a little safer you could just forbid closing over anything that contained a pointer.