# Distinction between \`@isolated(any)\` and \`@\_inheritActorContext\`

**URL:** <https://forums.swift.org/t/distinction-between-isolated-any-and-inheritactorcontext/75730>\
**Category:** Discussion\
**Tags:** concurrency\
**Created:** [October 31, 2024, 1:07pm UTC](https://forums.swift.org/t/distinction-between-isolated-any-and-inheritactorcontext/75730 "2024-10-31T13:07:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 2

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**Author:** ![hborla](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/swift/user_avatar/forums.swift.org/hborla/32/27563_2.png) [@hborla](https://forums.swift.org/u/hborla)\
**Post date:** [October 31, 2024, 2:55pm UTC](https://forums.swift.org/t/distinction-between-isolated-any-and-inheritactorcontext/75730/2 "2024-10-31T14:55:46Z")

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I agree that these two attributes are easy to confuse, especially with `@_inheritActorContext` not having been formalized / hidden from documentation / etc, but `@_inheritActorContext` and `@isolated(any)` have different effects.

`@isolated(any)` allows you to recover the isolation of a function value as an `(any Actor)?` value. It has no impact on the inferred isolation of a closure whose type includes `@isolated(any)`, and that's where I think people get confused. If you take `@isolated(any)` away, isolation inference behaves exactly the same way. For non-`@Sendable`/`sending` closures, isolation is already effectively "inherited" from the enclosing context where the closure is formed.

`@_inheritActorContext` is only useful when you have a closure that either `@Sendable` or passed to a `sending` parameter, and it applies the same isolation inference behavior that you would get if that closure didn't have those other concurrency annotations.

I think the need for `@isolated(any)` is fairly rare; the task creation APIs use the isolation value to enqueue the operation directly on the isolated actor to resolve the issue that tasks always (used to) begin on the generic executor. That problem wasn't caused by closures having the wrong static isolation, it was because the implementation of the task creation APIs didn't have the actor value to enqueue on.

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