In this particular case, I would rather crash. It’s easier to spot in a crash report and you get a nice stack trace.
Silent failure is ultimately terrible for users.
Note: for the things I control I try to very explicitly model state in such a way as I never need to force unwrap at all. But for things beyond my control like this situation, I would rather end the program than continue with a state of the world I don’t understand.
See my above/below comment.
A good tool for catching stuff during development, is the humble assert()[0]. We can use precondition()[1], to do the same thing, in ship code.
The main thing is, is to remain in control, as much as possible. Rather than let the PC leave the stack frame, throw the error immediately when it happens.
[0] https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...
[1] https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...
Agreed.
Unfortunately, crashes in iOS are “silent failures,” and are a loss of control.
What this practice does, is give me the option to handle the failure “noisily,” and in a controlled manner; even if just emitting a log entry, before calling a system failure. That can be quite helpful, in threading. Also, it gives me the option to have a valid value applied, if there’s a structural failure.
But the main reason that I do that with @IBOutlets, is that it forces me to acknowledge, throughout the rest of the code, that it’s an optional. I could always treat implicit optionals as if they were explicit, anyway. This just forces me to.
I have a bunch of practices that folks can laugh at, but my stuff works pretty effectively, and I sleep well.
Also, I have found App Store crash reports to be next to useless. TestFlight ones are a bit better.
But if I spend a lot of time, doing it right, the first time, we can avoid all kinds of heartbreak.
What have you found useless about the crash reports from the App Store? It would be really nice for it to have something like a breadcrumb capability, but typically the stack trace of the crash is sufficient to see what went wrong.