Agreed, the swift way is the correct way. For cases where you do want the Objective C behavior, you can just use the ?. operator. This way you get compile times

Agreed, the swift way is the correct way. For cases where you do want the Objective C behavior, you can just use the ?. operator. This way you get compile times guarantees by the type system, and where you actually want to use the "viral null" you can, and it's very explicit for people reading the code what it's doing.