Defer with local variable's state

This is a bug. Defer should track updates of the variable. Would you mind filing this at bugs.swift.org? Do you happen to know whether it reproduces only in debug or release builds, or both?

-Joe

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On Aug 11, 2016, at 7:16 AM, Sebastian Hagedorn via swift-users <swift-users@swift.org> wrote:

We often write code that returns early, but has to make sure a bit of code (e.g., a completion handler) is always called whenever we return, which seems like a great use case for defer. I started to write this:

func execute(with completion: ((Bool) -> Void)?) {
  var success = false
  defer {
    // should always execute with the current state of success at that time
    completion?(success)
  }

  guard … else {
    // completion is expected to be executed with false
    return
  }

  success = true

  // completion is expected to be executed with true
}

However, it seems that defer copies the state of success, which means any update to the variable is not respected, and the completion block is always called with false.

Is there a way to make this work? I could image to call a function within the defer block that evaluates the success (e.g., depending on the state of an instance variable), but using a local variable seems to encapsulate this a lot better.