Swift Programming Tutorial: Closures

Understand Swift Closures in a Few Minutes

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Closures are one of the more advanced but powerful features in Swift, and they’re super useful once you get the hang of them! Let’s break down closures in a simple way.

This article is part of my Swift Programming Tutorial series.

So, what’s a closure anyway? It’s a block of code that you can pass around and execute later. You can think of it like a function, but with more flexibility.

But, unlike a regular function, closures can capture and store variables or constants from their surrounding context (where they were created).

If you’re familiar with other programming languages, Swift’s closures are quite similar to anonymous functions or lambda expressions in languages like Python, JavaScript, and C#.

Syntax of Closures

Closures have a pretty compact syntax compared to functions. Here’s a very basic example:

let greetings = {
    print("Hello, Middle Earth!")
}

greetings()

Here’s a comparison with a function.

func greetings() {
    print("Hello, Middle Earth!")
}

So, does this mean closures cannot accept any parameters? Nope, they still can, but…