I've seen this several times in the past year, including the past three days. Please stop doing this!

You are conflating the ideas of instances and metatypes. Is that sentence enough for you to solve the problem or do you need to know where to find links with relevant information?

I think this is best illustrated with a capture list. You can capture the object, but it's not the default behavior. final class Object { var closure: () -> Object? = { nil } } @Test func test() { do { var object: Optional = Object() object!.closure = { object } weak var weakObject = object object = nil #expect(weakObject == nil) } do { var object: Optional = Object() object!.closure = { [object] in object } weak var weakObject = object object = nil #expect(weakObject != nil) } }