Comment by SkiFire13

Closures are pretty simple in relation to their captures lifetimes, but they do have a lot of complexity in how the lifetimes of their argument and return type are computed. The compiler has to basically infer them, and that can easily go very wrong. The only reason it works most of the time is because closures are immediately passed to functions whose trait bound specify the expected signature of the closure, but once you deviate a little bit from the common case things start to break down. For example if the bound is `F: SomeTrait` where `SomeTrait` is implemented for `FnOnce(&' i32) -> &i32` the inference will break. Similarly if you store the closure in a local variable before passing it to the function. This used to come up pretty often for "async" closures that were supposed to take a reference as input, since it's impossible to specify their correct trait bound using directly the `Fn*` traits. There are a bunch of related issues [1] in the rustc repo if you search for closure and higher ranked lifetimes.

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues?q=is%3Aopen%20is%3A...