# Advanced Functions and Closures
This section includes some more advanced features including function pointers and returning closures.

## Function Pointers
We have talked about how to pass closures to functions; you can also pass regular functions to functions.

This technique is useful when you want to pass a function that you have already defined rather than defining a new closure.

Functions coerce to the type `fn` (with a lowercase f), not to be confused with, not to be confused with the `Fn` closure trait.

The `fn` type is called a *function pointer*.

Passing function pointers will allow you to use functions as arguments to other functions.

The syntax for specifying that a parameter is a function pointer is similar to that of closures as shown below.

This shows that we have defined a function `add_one` that adds one to its parameter.

The function `do_twice` takes two parameters: a function pointer to any function takes an `i32` parameter and returns an `i32`, and one `i32` value.

The `do_twice` function calls the function `f` twice, passing it the `arg` value, then adds the two function call results together.

The `main` function calls `do_twice` with the arguments `add_one` and `5`.
```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}");
}
```
Output
```
The answer is: 12
```
Here we specify that the parameter `f` in `do_twice` is an `fn` that takes one parameter of type `i32` and returns a `i32`.

We can then call `f` from the body of `do_twice`.

In `main` we can pass the function name `add_one` as the first arg to `do_twice`.

Unlike closures, `fn` is a type rather than a trait, so we need to 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`).

This means that you can always pass a function pointer as an argument for a function that expects a closure.

It is best to write functions using a generic type and one of the closure traits so your functions can accept either functions or closures.

That being said, one example of where you would only want to 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.

As an example of where you could use either a closure defined inline or a named function.

Lets look at a use of the `map` method provided by the `Iterator` trait in the std library.

To use the `map` function to turn a vector of numbers into a vector of strings, we could use a closure.

Like this:
```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();
```
We could have a function as the argument to `map` instead of the closure.

Like this:
```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, we must use the fully qualified syntax that we talked about earlier in ["Advanced Traits"](./Advanced%20Traits.md) section.

This is because there are multiple functions available named `to_string`.

Here we are using the `to_string` function defined in the `ToString` trait, which is in the std library has implemented for any type that implements `Display`.

Recall form the ["Enum values"]() section of Ch6 that the name of each enum variant that we define also becomes an initializer function.

We can use these initializer functions as function pointers that implement the closure traits, this means we can specify the initializer functions as arguments for methods that take closures.

Like this:
```rust
    enum Status {
        Value(u32),
        Stop,
    }

    let list_of_statuses: Vec<Status> = (0u32..20).map(Status::Value).collect();
```
Here we creates `Status::Value` instances using each `u32` value in the range that `map` is called on by using the initializer function of `Status::Value`.

Some prefer to use this style, and some people prefer to use closures.

They compile to the same code, so use whatever style is clearer to you.

## Returning Closures
Closures are represented by traits, meaning that you can't return closures directly.

In cases where you want to return a trait, you instead use the concrete type that implements the trait as the return value of the function.

You are unable to do that with closures because they do not have a concrete type that is returnable.

You are not allowed to use the function pointer `fn` as a return type, for example.

Instead, you would normally use the `impl Trait` syntax we learned from Ch10.

You can return any function type using the `Fn`, `FnOnce` and `FnMut`.

This code would work just fine.
```rust
fn returns_closure() -> impl Fn(i32) -> i32 {
    |x| x + 1
}
```
As noted in the ["Closure Type Inference and Annotation"](./Closures.md#closure-type-inference-and-annoation) section in Ch13, each closure is also its own distinct type.

If you needed to work with multiple functions that have the same signature but slightly different implementations, you will need to use a trait object for them.
```rust
fn main() {
    let handlers = vec![returns_closure(), returns_initialized_closure(123)];
    for handler in handlers {
        let output = handler(5);
        println!("{output}");
    }
}

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

fn returns_initialized_closure(init: i32) -> Box<dyn Fn(i32) -> i32> {
    Box::new(move |x| x + init)
}
```
This will compile just fine, but it wouldn't if we had tried to stick with `impl Fn(i32) -> i32`.