RFC 0968: closure-return-type-syntax

lang (syntax | closures)

Summary

Restrict closure return type syntax for future compatibility.

Motivation

Today's closure return type syntax juxtaposes a type and an expression. This is dangerous: if we choose to extend the type grammar to be more acceptable, we can easily break existing code.

Detailed design

The current closure syntax for annotating the return type is |Args| -> Type Expr, where Type is the return type and Expr is the body of the closure. This syntax is future hostile and relies on being able to determine the end point of a type. If we extend the syntax for types, we could cause parse errors in existing code.

An example from history is that we extended the type grammar to include things like Fn(..). This would have caused the following, previous, legal -- closure not to parse: || -> Foo (Foo). As a simple fix, this RFC proposes that if a return type annotation is supplied, the body must be enclosed in braces: || -> Foo { (Foo) }. Types are already juxtaposed with open braces in fn items, so this should not be an additional danger for future evolution.

Drawbacks

This design is minimally invasive but perhaps unfortunate in that it's not obvious that braces would be required. But then, return type annotations are very rarely used.

Alternatives

I am not aware of any alternate designs. One possibility would be to remove return type annotations altogether, perhaps relying on type ascription or other annotations to force the inferencer to figure things out, but they are useful in rare scenarios. In particular type ascription would not be able to handle a higher-ranked signature like for<'a> &'a X -> &'a Y without improving the type checker implementation in other ways (in particular, we don't infer generalization over lifetimes at present, unless we can figure it out from the expected type or explicit annotations).

Unresolved questions

None.