If Apple is indeed granted the patent on Swift's optional chaining (as was recently posted https://forums.swift.org/t/apple-is-indeed-patenting-swift-f... ), we wouldn't see this in future Javascript, would we?
Swift's is also tied to their `Optional<T>` wrapper type, any potential JS implementation would be more like Groovy's.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050815012153/http://groovy.cod... , bottom of the page
https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/LICENSE.txt
TC39 (who defines Javascript) is a collaboration of several companies, so I'm not sure who Apple could/would even sue if this was proposed and adopted for JS. I doubt we would see legal activity over it.
Which has been around since 1998 at least (When Haskell 1.3 added monads)
[0]: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/blob/1.0.0/lib/par...
Will it lead to many JS bugs simply disappearing and applications getting more stable or will it just obfuscate bugs in the long run?
In TypeScript, these properties would explicitly have a `MyType|null` or `MyType|undefined` type.
"or will it just obfuscate bugs in the long run?"
Probably. :shrug emojii:
But more stable in the sense of turning hard crashes into UI quirks.