Xcode Beta 5 was released with several good changes.  I don’t want this to just be a “What’s new in Xcode Beta 5” post, because once Beta 6 is released, much less the real language, the only point for a post like that is history.  So I am mostly going to talk about my favorite addition to Xcode 6 about optionals, with a short mention of a change that affects it.  This great operator is still available in Swift 2.2 (Xcode 7.3) as well!

Nil Coalescing Operator

I did not see this one coming, but I do like it.  It basically is a way to easily return an unwrapped optional, or a default value.  As with many other parts of optionals, this operator is composed of question marks.  Below is a simple example:

var someOptional: Int? = nil
var aDefaultValue = 42

var theAnswer = someOptional ?? aDefaultValue

Since someOptional is nil (we didn’t set it to a valid Int yet), theAnswer will of course be 42.
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As promised last time, here is part two of my post about Swift optionals.  Here we will discuss a few more advanced aspects on how to deal with optionals, optional chaining and implicitly unwrapped optionals.  These are a few more tricks to get values out of optionals, while keeping Swift code much cleaner than its predecessors.  Optional chaining makes it easy to drill into multiple levels of optional values.  Implicitly unwrapped optionals, while not as safe as normal optionals, are often used under the assumption that the value that it is describing is never, or usually not, nil.

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Continuing our conversations about variables in Swift, lets move on to one of the more important additions in this realm to Swift, Optionals.  In Swift, all normal variables must have a value.  In Objective-C, C-based variables (primitives) always had to have a value, but object types could either be a valid object, or a pointer to nil.  Swift optionals allow you to make any type in Swift into a nil-able type (though this nil is not exactly the same as an Objective-C nil).
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