How do JavaScript closures work?

Question

How would you explain JavaScript closures to someone with a knowledge of the concepts they consist of (for example functions, variables and the like), but does not understand closures themselves?

I have seen the Scheme example given on Wikipedia, but unfortunately it did not help.

Answer 1

The children will always remember the secrets they have shared with their parents, even after their parents are gone. This is what closures are for functions.

The secrets for JavaScript functions are the private variables

var parent = function() {
 var name = "Mary"; // secret
}

Every time you call it, local variable "name" is created and given name "Mary". And every time the function exits the variable is lost and the name is forgotten.

As you may guess, because the variables are re-created every time the function is called, and nobody else will know them, there must be a secret place where they are stored. It could be called Chamber of Secrets or stack or local scope but it doesn't really matter. We know they are there, somewhere, hidden in the memory.

But, in JavaScript there is this very special thing that functions which are created inside other functions, can also know the local variables of their parents and keep them as long as they live.

var parent = function() {
  var name = "Mary";
  var child = function(childName) {
    // I can also see that "name" is "Mary"
  }
}

So, as long as we are in the parent -function, it can create one or more child functions which do share the secret variables from the secret place.

But the sad thing is, if the child is also a private variable of its parent function, it would also die when the parent ends, and the secrets would die with them.

So to live, the child has to leave before it's too late

var parent = function() {
  var name = "Mary";
  var child = function(childName) {
    return "My name is " + childName  +", child of " + name; 
  }
  return child; // child leaves the parent ->
}
var child = parent(); // < - and here it is outside 

And now, even though Mary is "no longer running", the memory of her is not lost and her child will always remember her name and other secrets they shared during their time together.

So, if you call the child "Alice", she will respond

child("Alice") => "My name is Alice, child of Mary"

That's all there is to tell.

Answer 2

You're having a sleep over and you invite Dan. You tell Dan to bring one XBox controller.

Dan invites Paul. Dan asks Paul to bring one controller. How many controllers were brought to the party?

function sleepOver(howManyControllersToBring) {

    var numberOfDansControllers = howManyControllersToBring;

    return function danInvitedPaul(numberOfPaulsControllers) {
        var totalControllers = numberOfDansControllers + numberOfPaulsControllers;
        return totalControllers;
    }
}

var howManyControllersToBring = 1;

var inviteDan = sleepOver(howManyControllersToBring);

// The only reason Paul was invited is because Dan was invited. 
// So we set Paul's invitation = Dan's invitation.

var danInvitedPaul = inviteDan(howManyControllersToBring);

alert("There were " + danInvitedPaul + " controllers brought to the party.");

Answer 3

An answer for a six-year-old (assuming he knows what a function is and what a variable is, and what data is):

Functions can return data. One kind of data you can return from a function is another function. When that new function gets returned, all the variables and arguments used in the function that created it don't go away. Instead, that parent function "closes." In other words, nothing can look inside of it and see the variables it used except for the function it returned. That new function has a special ability to look back inside the function that created it and see the data inside of it.

function the_closure() {
  var x = 4;
  return function () {
    return x; // Here, we look back inside the_closure for the value of x
  }
}

var myFn = the_closure();
myFn(); //=> 4

Another really simple way to explain it is in terms of scope:

Any time you create a smaller scope inside of a larger scope, the smaller scope will always be able to see what is in the larger scope.

Answer 4

JavaScript closures for beginners

Submitted by Morris on Tue, 2006-02-21 10:19. Community-edited since.

Closures are not magic

This page explains closures so that a programmer can understand them — using working JavaScript code. It is not for gurus or functional programmers.

Closures are not hard to understand once the core concept is grokked. However, they are impossible to understand by reading any theoretical or academically oriented explanations!

This article is intended for programmers with some programming experience in a mainstream language, and who can read the following JavaScript function:

function sayHello(name) {
  var text = 'Hello ' + name;
  var say = function() { console.log(text); }
  say();
}
sayHello('Joe');

Two brief summaries

• When a function (foo) declares other functions (bar and baz), the family of local variables created in foo is not destroyed when the function exits. The variables merely become invisible to the outside world. foo can therefore cunningly return the functions bar and baz, and they can continue to read, write and communicate with each other through this closed-off family of variables ("the closure") that nobody else can meddle with, not even someone who calls foo again in future.

• A closure is one way of supporting first-class functions; it is an expression that can reference variables within its scope (when it was first declared), be assigned to a variable, be passed as an argument to a function, or be returned as a function result.

An example of a closure

The following code returns a reference to a function:

function sayHello2(name) {
  var text = 'Hello ' + name; // Local variable
  var say = function() { console.log(text); }
  return say;
}
var say2 = sayHello2('Bob');
say2(); // logs "Hello Bob"

Most JavaScript programmers will understand how a reference to a function is returned to a variable (say2) in the above code. If you don't, then you need to look at that before you can learn closures. A programmer using C would think of the function as returning a pointer to a function, and that the variables say and say2 were each a pointer to a function.

There is a critical difference between a C pointer to a function and a JavaScript reference to a function. In JavaScript, you can think of a function reference variable as having both a pointer to a function as well as a hidden pointer to a closure.

The above code has a closure because the anonymous function function() { console.log(text); } is declared inside another function, sayHello2() in this example. In JavaScript, if you use the function keyword inside another function, you are creating a closure.

In C and most other common languages, after a function returns, all the local variables are no longer accessible because the stack-frame is destroyed.

In JavaScript, if you declare a function within another function, then the local variables of the outer function can remain accessible after returning from it. This is demonstrated above, because we call the function say2() after we have returned from sayHello2(). Notice that the code that we call references the variable text, which was a local variable of the function sayHello2().

function() { console.log(text); } // Output of say2.toString();

Looking at the output of say2.toString(), we can see that the code refers to the variable text. The anonymous function can reference text which holds the value 'Hello Bob' because the local variables of sayHello2() have been secretly kept alive in a closure.

The genius is that in JavaScript a function reference also has a secret reference to the closure it was created in — similar to how delegates are a method pointer plus a secret reference to an object.

More examples

For some reason, closures seem really hard to understand when you read about them, but when you see some examples, it becomes clear how they work (it took me a while). I recommend working through the examples carefully until you understand how they work. If you start using closures without fully understanding how they work, you would soon create some very weird bugs!

Example 3

This example shows that the local variables are not copied — they are kept by reference. It is as though the stack-frame stays alive in memory even after the outer function exits!

function say667() {
  // Local variable that ends up within closure
  var num = 42;
  var say = function() { console.log(num); }
  num++;
  return say;
}
var sayNumber = say667();
sayNumber(); // logs 43

Example 4

All three global functions have a common reference to the same closure because they are all declared within a single call to setupSomeGlobals().

var gLogNumber, gIncreaseNumber, gSetNumber;
function setupSomeGlobals() {
  // Local variable that ends up within closure
  var num = 42;
  // Store some references to functions as global variables
  gLogNumber = function() { console.log(num); }
  gIncreaseNumber = function() { num++; }
  gSetNumber = function(x) { num = x; }
}

setupSomeGlobals();
gIncreaseNumber();
gLogNumber(); // 43
gSetNumber(5);
gLogNumber(); // 5

var oldLog = gLogNumber;

setupSomeGlobals();
gLogNumber(); // 42

oldLog() // 5

The three functions have shared access to the same closure — the local variables of setupSomeGlobals() when the three functions were defined.

Note that in the above example, if you call setupSomeGlobals() again, then a new closure (stack-frame!) is created. The old gLogNumber, gIncreaseNumber, gSetNumber variables are overwritten with new functions that have the new closure. (In JavaScript, whenever you declare a function inside another function, the inside function(s) is/are recreated again each time the outside function is called.)

Example 5

This example shows that the closure contains any local variables that were declared inside the outer function before it exited. Note that the variable alice is actually declared after the anonymous function. The anonymous function is declared first and when that function is called it can access the alice variable because alice is in the same scope (JavaScript does variable hoisting). Also sayAlice()() just directly calls the function reference returned from sayAlice() — it is exactly the same as what was done previously but without the temporary variable.

function sayAlice() {
    var say = function() { console.log(alice); }
    // Local variable that ends up within closure
    var alice = 'Hello Alice';
    return say;
}
sayAlice()();// logs "Hello Alice"

Tricky: note the say variable is also inside the closure and could be accessed by any other function that might be declared within sayAlice(), or it could be accessed recursively within the inside function.

Example 6

This one is a real gotcha for many people, so you need to understand it. Be very careful if you are defining a function within a loop: the local variables from the closure may not act as you might first think.

You need to understand the "variable hoisting" feature in Javascript in order to understand this example.

function buildList(list) {
    var result = [];
    for (var i = 0; i < list.length; i++) {
        var item = 'item' + i;
        result.push( function() {console.log(item + ' ' + list[i])} );
    }
    return result;
}

function testList() {
    var fnlist = buildList([1,2,3]);
    // Using j only to help prevent confusion -- could use i.
    for (var j = 0; j < fnlist.length; j++) {
        fnlist[j]();
    }
}

 testList() //logs "item2 undefined" 3 times

The line result.push( function() {console.log(item + ' ' + list[i])} adds a reference to an anonymous function three times to the result array. If you are not so familiar with anonymous functions think of it like:

pointer = function() {console.log(item + ' ' + list[i])};
result.push(pointer);

Note that when you run the example, "item2 undefined" is logged three times! This is because just like previous examples, there is only one closure for the local variables for buildList (which are result, i, list and item). When the anonymous functions are called on the line fnlist[j](); they all use the same single closure, and they use the current value for i and item within that one closure (where i has a value of 3 because the loop had completed, and item has a value of 'item2'). Note we are indexing from 0 hence item has a value of item2. And the i++ will increment i to the value 3.

It may be helpful to see what happens when a block-level declaration of the variable item is used (via the let keyword) instead of a function-scoped variable declaration via the var keyword. If that change is made, then each anonymous function in the array result has its own closure; when the example is run the output is as follows:

item0 undefined
item1 undefined
item2 undefined

If the variable i is also defined using let instead of var, then the output is:

item0 1
item1 2
item2 3

Example 7

In this final example, each call to the main function creates a separate closure.

function newClosure(someNum, someRef) {
    // Local variables that end up within closure
    var num = someNum;
    var anArray = [1,2,3];
    var ref = someRef;
    return function(x) {
        num += x;
        anArray.push(num);
        console.log('num: ' + num +
            '; anArray: ' + anArray.toString() +
            '; ref.someVar: ' + ref.someVar + ';');
      }
}
obj = {someVar: 4};
fn1 = newClosure(4, obj);
fn2 = newClosure(5, obj);
fn1(1); // num: 5; anArray: 1,2,3,5; ref.someVar: 4;
fn2(1); // num: 6; anArray: 1,2,3,6; ref.someVar: 4;
obj.someVar++;
fn1(2); // num: 7; anArray: 1,2,3,5,7; ref.someVar: 5;
fn2(2); // num: 8; anArray: 1,2,3,6,8; ref.someVar: 5;

Summary

If everything seems completely unclear, then the best thing to do is to play with the examples. Reading an explanation is much harder than understanding examples. My explanations of closures and stack-frames, etc. are not technically correct — they are gross simplifications intended to help to understand. Once the basic idea is grokked, you can pick up the details later.

Final points:

• Whenever you use function inside another function, a closure is used.
• Whenever you use eval() inside a function, a closure is used. The text you eval can reference local variables of the function, and within eval you can even create new local variables by using eval('var foo = …')
• When you use new Function(…) (the Function constructor) inside a function, it does not create a closure. (The new function cannot reference the local variables of the outer function.)
• A closure in JavaScript is like keeping a copy of all the local variables, just as they were when a function exited.
• It is probably best to think that a closure is always created just an entry to a function, and the local variables are added to that closure.
• A new set of local variables is kept every time a function with a closure is called (given that the function contains a function declaration inside it, and a reference to that inside function is either returned or an external reference is kept for it in some way).
• Two functions might look like they have the same source text, but have completely different behavior because of their 'hidden' closure. I don't think JavaScript code can actually find out if a function reference has a closure or not.
• If you are trying to do any dynamic source code modifications (for example: myFunction = Function(myFunction.toString().replace(/Hello/,'Hola'));), it won't work if myFunction is a closure (of course, you would never even think of doing source code string substitution at runtime, but...).
• It is possible to get function declarations within function declarations within functions… and you can get closures at more than one level.
• I think normally a closure is a term for both the function along with the variables that are captured. Note that I do not use that definition in this article!
• I suspect that closures in JavaScript differ from those normally found in functional languages.

Links

• Douglas Crockford's simulated private attributes and private methods for an object, using closures.
• A great explanation of how closures can cause memory leaks in IE if you are not careful.

Thanks

If you have just learned closures (here or elsewhere!), then I am interested in any feedback from you about any changes you might suggest that could make this article clearer. Send an email to morrisjohns.com (morris_closure @). Please note that I am not a guru on JavaScript — nor on closures.

---

Original post by Morris can be found in the Internet Archive.

Answer 5

How I'd explain it to a six-year-old:

You know how grown-ups can own a house, and they call it home? When a mom has a child, the child doesn't really own anything, right? But its parents own a house, so whenever someone asks the child "Where's your home?", he/she can answer "that house!", and point to the house of its parents. A "Closure" is the ability of the child to always (even if abroad) be able to say it has a home, even though it's really the parent's who own the house.

Answer 6

I put together an interactive JavaScript tutorial to explain how closures work. What's a Closure?

Here's one of the examples:

var create = function (x) {
    var f = function () {
        return x; // We can refer to x here!
    };
    return f;
};
// 'create' takes one argument, creates a function

var g = create(42);
// g is a function that takes no arguments now

var y = g();
// y is 42 here