Swift Style

Moving from Thrown Errors to Optionals

Swift offers two variations of try that bypass normal error handling: try! halts execution if an error is thrown. try? converts throwing results into optionals, returning a wrapped value on success or nil otherwise. Using try? discards errors.

Forcing crashes (with try!) and discarding errors by coercing results to optionals (with try?) are not good practices. At a minimum, prefer to catch and log errors instead of ignoring them entirely:

public func attempt<T>(closure: () throws -> T) -> T? {
    do { return try closure() }
      catch { print(error); return nil }
}

• Avoid forced trys ...