Understanding how let declaration works in for loop

Table of Contents

The Problem

To start of, you probably come across this before:

for (let i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
  setTimeout(() => console.log(i), i * 100);
}
// 0
// 1
// 2

for (var i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
  setTimeout(() => console.log(i), i * 100);
}
// 3
// 3
// 3

And you may have just thought that this was some of the quirks of var and why you should only use let, but what is actually happening here?

A Deeper Look

While the code above is asynchronous, this issue isn't related to that, we can recreate it it in plain functions:

let logs = [];
for (var i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
  logs[i] = () => console.log(i);
}
logs[0](); // 3
logs[1](); // 3
logs[2](); // 3

It's all about closure and how let and var behave inside for.

Before continuing, a quick refresh of closure from MDN:

A closure is the combination of a function bundled together (enclosed) with references to its surrounding state (the lexical environment). In other words, a closure gives you access to an outer function's scope from an inner function. In JavaScript, closures are created every time a function is created, at function creation time.

if closure is a new concept to you please read the previous documentation page before continuing this post.

Now back to our example, it looks like let behavior above is intuitive and expected at first look but it's actually the one behaving against what should happen from a closure perspective, because according to how closure works, all those functions (seem to) reference the same variable i (closure is a live link, not a snapshot of variables) which means that after finishing all the iterations i value is 3, and it would make sense for each call after that to also log 3, but that's not the case. To prove that, we are going to declare i outside the for:

let i;
for (i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
  setTimeout(() => console.log(i), i * 100);
}
// 3
// 3
// 3

Hmmm... seems like this is related to the scope of i.

How let declaration works in loops

At first glance, i in for(let i = 0;...) seems to be in an outer scope, not in the scope of the loop, but it's actually in the scope of the loop, it make sense to think about how for work like this:

{
  // a fictional variable for illustration
  let $$i = 0;
  for (; /* nothing */ $$i < 3; $$i++) {
    // here's our actual loop `i`!
    let i = $$i;
    setTimeout(() => console.log(i), i * 100);
  }
  // 0
  // 1
  // 2
}

Because let is block-scoped, and it's in the scope of for, the variable i gets a new binding for each iteration, making it behave intuitively rather than what would you think would happen if you thought about i having only one binding.

In contrast, var is function-scoped and using it inside for would still place it in the outer scope (global scope in the example), or placing let declaration outside of the for body, in both cases, we only get one binding and it is to be expected to get the last value of i, as variables from closure are a live link of their values, not a snapshot in time.

Wrapping Up

While I don't think this gotcha would really cause any problems normally, as this what would you expect to happen when using for loops (in every iteration, i hold the same value (same binding) regardless of when it's executed) and nobody uses var anymore, not for loops at least, I still think it's good to understand how let work in and outside for, maybe for some reason you had to declare i outside of the for loop and got stuck on why it' holding the last i value.

This post relied heavily on the incredible book: You Don't Know JS Yet: Scope & Closures by Kyle Simpson, the book goes really deep into scope and closure, what are they, common pitfalls, and how to benefit from them.