Optional? More like obligatory

Wow, when I heard that Swift was an “opinionated” language, I thought that wouldn’t be too different from the boilerplate that I’m used to from Java. Or that it could be similar to how finicky pointers and memory management is in C++ and C respectively. But wow, I’ve been trying to debug a Supabase database response for a long time now and when I finally found a GitHub Issue that mentioned a similar issue that I was facing, I realized I was nowhere near solving it myself.

I guess I should have expected being surprised by how opinionated Swift was, especially coming from JavaScript (literally the most un-opinionated language there is).

To that end, I actually tested a Supabase endpoint using the Python library to make sure that something was being returned.

What ended up solving the issue I was facing, was actually casting the response to a class that I made that inherited Encodable and Decodable. And also marking that response as optional. In other words, simply putting a question mark (”?” for those still confused) after the type cast of the response, in other words:

if let response: [CodableClassThatIMade]? = try await client.database....

To be fair, I was also expecting that using print statements (or console.log as I’m used to) will display pretty much any object passed to them. In Swift, or at least XCode, that doesn’t seem to be the case, more akin to [object Object]. Once I was able to print that the count of the returning array was greater than 0, I’m confident that I figured out the issue I was having.

I feel like guard let and if let and some of the optional stuff is ultimately just going to be part of the Swift language that I never truly end up internalizing. Similar to how I currently understand async await in JS (after about 3 months of using it). I get it at the base level, and enough to use it. But I honestly don’t know how much of my time it’s worth to get deep into the weeds on this.