[swift-evolution] Should explicit `self.` be required when providing method as closure?

[Josh Parmenter]

Honestly, I think this is one of the rougher parts of the language to see problems in. In my opinion, anything that can be done to either warn of retain cycles or enforce a better practice in this would be valuable.
Josh

On Mar 3, 2017, at 1:14 PM, Alex Johnson via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org<mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:

Hi list members,

During code review today, I noticed a really subtle memory leak that looked like:

    self.relatedObject = RelatedObject(callback: relatedObjectDidFinish)

Where `relatedObject` is a strong reference, `callback` is an escaping closure, and `relatedObjectDidFinish` is a method of `self`. From a memory management perspective, this code is equivalent to:

    self.relatedObject = RelatedObject(callback: { self.relatedObjectDidFinish })

In the second example, an explicit `self.` is required. It’s my understanding that this is to highlight that the closure keeps a strong reference to `self`. But, when passing a method, there is no such requirement, which makes it easier to accidentally create a retain cycle.

This made me wonder if an explicit `self.` should be required when passing a method as an escaping closure. And whether that would help in the same way that the explicit `self.` *inside* the closure is intended to.

If it were required, the code in the first example would be:

    self.relatedObject = RelatedObject(callback: self.relatedObjectDidFinish)

What do you think?

Alex Johnson
ajohnson at walmartlabs.com<mailto:ajohnson at walmartlabs.com>
ajohnson on Slack
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