This seems a bit roundabout and complex, and I admit that it is. But let's think of the "do nothing" alternative -- we could instead mark all `AsyncFn*` goals as ambiguous until upvar analysis, at which point we would know exactly what to put into the upvars of the coroutine we return. However, this is actually *very* detrimental to inference in the program, since it means that programs like this would not be valid:
```rust!
let c = async || -> String { .. };
let s = c().await;
// ^^^ If we can't project `<{c} as AsyncFn>::call()` to a coroutine, then the `IntoFuture::into_future` call inside of the `.await` stalls, and the type of `s` is left unconstrained as an infer var.
s.as_bytes();
// ^^^ That means we can't call any methods on the awaited return of a coroutine-closure, like... at all!
```
So *instead*, we use this alias (in this case, a projection: `AsyncFnKindHelper::Upvars<'env, ...>`) to delay the computation of the *tupled upvars* and give us something to put in its place, while still allowing us to return a `TyKind::Coroutine` (which is a rigid type) and we may successfully confirm the built-in traits we need (in our case, `Future`), since the `Future` implementation doesn't depend on the upvars at all.
### Upvar analysis
By and large, the upvar analysis for coroutine-closures and their child coroutines proceeds like normal upvar analysis. However, there are several interesting bits that happen to account for async closures' special natures:
#### Forcing all inputs to be captured
Like async fn, all input arguments are captured. We explicitly force[^f1] all of these inputs to be captured by move so that the future coroutine returned by async closures does not depend on whether the input is *used* by the body or not, which would impart an interesting semver hazard.
#### Computing the by-ref captures
For a coroutine-closure that supports `AsyncFn`/`AsyncFnMut`, we must also compute the relationship between the captures of the coroutine-closure and its child coroutine. Specifically, the coroutine-closure may `move` a upvar into its captures, but the coroutine may only borrow that upvar.
We compute the "`coroutine_captures_by_ref_ty`" by looking at all of the child coroutine's captures and comparing them to the corresponding capture of the parent coroutine-closure[^br1]. This `coroutine_captures_by_ref_ty` ends up being represented as a `for<'env> fn() -> captures...` type, with the additional binder lifetime representing the "`&self`" lifetime of calling `AsyncFn::async_call` or `AsyncFnMut::async_call_mut`. We instantiate that binder later when actually calling the methods.
Note that not every by-ref capture from the parent coroutine-closure results in a "lending" borrow. See the **Follow-up: When do async closures implement the regular `Fn*` traits?** section below for more details, since this intimately influences whether or not the coroutine-closure is allowed to implement the `Fn*` family of traits.
#### By-move body + `FnOnce` quirk
There are several situations where the closure upvar analysis ends up inferring upvars for the coroutine-closure's child coroutine that are too relaxed, and end up resulting in borrow-checker errors. This is best illustrated via examples. For example, given:
```rust
fn force_fnonce<T: async FnOnce()>(t: T) -> T { t }
let x = String::new();
let c = force_fnonce(async move || {
println!("{x}");
});
```
`x` will be moved into the coroutine-closure, but the coroutine that is returned would only borrow `&x`. However, since `force_fnonce` forces the coroutine-closure to `AsyncFnOnce`, which is not *lending*, we must force the capture to happen by-move[^bm1].
Similarly:
```rust
let x = String::new();
let y = String::new();
let c = async move || {
drop(y);
println!("{x}");
};
```
`x` will be moved into the coroutine-closure, but the coroutine that is returned would only borrow `&x`. However, since we also capture `y` and drop it, the coroutine-closure is forced to be `AsyncFnOnce`. We must also force the capture of `x` to happen by-move. To determine this situation in particular, since unlike the last example the coroutine-kind's closure-kind has not yet been constrained, we must analyze the body of the coroutine-closure to see if how all of the upvars are used, to determine if they've been used in a way that is "consuming" -- i.e. that would force it to `FnOnce`[^bm2].