## Advanced Functions & Closures

Finally, let’s discuss some advanced features related to functions and
closures: function pointers, diverging functions, and returning closures.

### Function Pointers




We’ve talked about how to pass closures to functions; you can also pass regular
functions to functions! This is useful when we want to pass a function we’ve
already defined rather than defining a new closure. We do this using function
pointers to allow us to use functions as arguments to other functions.
Functions coerce to the type `fn`, with a lower case ‘f’ not to be confused
with the `Fn` closure trait. The `fn` type is called a *function pointer*. The
syntax for specifying that a parameter is a function pointer is similar to that
of closures, as shown in Listing 19-35:

Filename: src/main.rs

```rust
fn add_one(x: i32) -> i32 {
    x + 1
}

fn do_twice(f: fn(i32) -> i32, arg: i32) -> i32 {
    f(arg) + f(arg)
}

fn main() {
    let answer = do_twice(add_one, 5);

    println!("The answer is: {}", answer);
}
```

Listing 19-35: Using the `fn` type to accept a function
pointer as an argument

This prints `The answer is: 12`. We specify that the parameter `f` in
`do_twice` is an `fn` that takes one parameter of type `i32` and returns an
`i32`. We can then call `f` in the body of `do_twice`. In `main`, we can pass
the function name `add_one` as the first argument to `do_twice`.

Unlike closures, `fn` is a type rather than a trait, so we specify `fn` as the
parameter type directly, rather than declaring a generic type parameter with
one of the `Fn` traits as a trait bound.

Function pointers implement all three of the closure traits (`Fn`, `FnMut`, and
`FnOnce`), so we can always pass a function pointer as an argument for a
function that expects a closure. Prefer to write functions using a generic type
and one of the closure traits, so that your functions can accept either
functions or closures.

An example of a case where you’d want to only accept `fn` and not closures is
when interfacing with external code that doesn’t have closures: C functions can
accept functions as arguments, but C doesn’t have closures.

For an example where we can use either a closure defined inline or a named
function, let’s look at a use of `map`. To use the `map` function to turn a
vector of numbers into a vector of strings, we could use a closure:

```rust
let list_of_numbers = vec![1, 2, 3];
let list_of_strings: Vec<String> = list_of_numbers
    .iter()
    .map(|i| i.to_string())
    .collect();
```

Or we could name a function as the argument to `map` instead of the closure:

```rust
let list_of_numbers = vec![1, 2, 3];
let list_of_strings: Vec<String> = list_of_numbers
    .iter()
    .map(ToString::to_string)
    .collect();
```

Note that we do have to use the fully qualified syntax that we talked about in
the “Advanced Traits” section because there are multiple functions available
named `to_string`; here, we’re using the `to_string` function defined in the
`ToString` trait, which the standard library has implemented for any type that
implements `Display`.

Some people prefer this style, some people prefer to use closures. They end up
with the same code, so use whichever feels more clear to you.

### Returning Closures

Closures are represented by traits, which means we can’t return closures
directly. In most cases where we may want to return a trait, we can instead use
the concrete type that implements the trait as the return value of the
function. We can’t do that with closures, though, because they don’t have a
concrete type that’s returnable; we’re not allowed to use the function pointer
`fn` as a return type, for example.

This code that tries to return a closure directly won’t compile:

```rust,ignore
fn returns_closure() -> Fn(i32) -> i32 {
    |x| x + 1
}
```

The compiler error is:

```text
error[E0277]: the trait bound `std::ops::Fn(i32) -> i32 + 'static:
std::marker::Sized` is not satisfied
 -->
  |
1 | fn returns_closure() -> Fn(i32) -> i32 {
  |                         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ `std::ops::Fn(i32) -> i32 + 'static`
  does not have a constant size known at compile-time
  |
  = help: the trait `std::marker::Sized` is not implemented for
  `std::ops::Fn(i32) -> i32 + 'static`
  = note: the return type of a function must have a statically known size
```

Our error references the `Sized` trait again! Rust doesn’t know how much space
it will need to store the closure. We saw a solution to this in the previous
section: we can use a trait object:

```rust
fn returns_closure() -> Box<Fn(i32) -> i32> {
    Box::new(|x| x + 1)
}
```

This code will compile just fine. For more about trait objects, refer back to
the “Trait Objects” section in Chapter 17.

## Summary

Whew! Now we’ve gone over features of Rust that aren’t used often, but are
available if you need them in very particular circumstances. We’ve introduced a
lot of complex topics so that, when you encounter them in error message
suggestions or in others’ code, you’ll at least have seen these concepts and
syntax once before. You can use this chapter as a reference to guide you to
your solutions.

Now, let’s put everything we’ve learned throughout the book into practice with
one more project!
