What the heck are closures and why does Swift love them so much?
Updated for Xcode 15
Go on, admit it: you asked yourself exactly this question. If you didn’t I’d be surprised, because closures are one of the most powerful features of Swift but also easily the feature that confuses people.
So, if you’re sitting here thinking “wow, closures are really hard”, don’t be dismayed – they are hard, and you finding them hard just means your brain is operating correctly.
One of the most common reasons for closures in Swift is to store functionality – to be able to say “here’s some work I want you to do at some point, but not necessarily now.” Some examples:
- Running some code after a delay.
- Running some code after an animation has finished.
- Running some code when a download has finished.
- Running some code when a user has selected an option from your menu.
Closures let us wrap up some functionality in a single variable, then store that somewhere. We can also return it from a function, and store the closure somewhere else.
When you’re learning, closures are a little hard to read – particularly when they accept and/or return their own parameters. But that’s OK: take small steps, and backtrack if you get stuck, and you’ll be fine.
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