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Disallow coercion to optionals in operator arguments

Introduction

Swift provides optional types as a means of achieving safety by making the notion of "having" or "not having" a value explicit. This requires programmers to explicitly test whether a variable has a value or not prior to using that value, with the affordance that a user can explicitly force-unwrap the optional if desired (with the semantics that the process will trap if the optional does not have a value).

As a convenience to make optionals easier to use, Swift provides syntactic sugar for declaring and using them (for example, T? to declare an Optional<T>). As another convenience, Swift provides coercion of non-optional types to optional types, making it possible to write code like this:

func consumesOptional(value: Int?) -> Int { ... }

let x: Int = 1
let y = consumesOptional(value: x)

or code like this:

func returnsOptional() -> Int? {
  let x: Int = ...
  return x
}

Note that we are passing an Int to consumesOptional, despite the fact that it is declared to accept Int?, and we are returning an Int from returnsOptional despite the fact that it is declared to return Int?.

This coercion happens for normal function calls, the assignment statement, and for operators defined with optional parameter types, e.g. the comparison operators and the nil-coalescing operator (??).

Swift-evolution thread: Optional comparison operators

Proposal

Disallow the coercion from values to optionals in the context of arguments to operators.

Add mixed-optionality versions of the equality operators for Equatable types, and identity operators for AnyObject.

Motivation

The convenience of coercing values to optionals is very nice in the context of normal function calls, but in the context of operators, it can lead to some strange and unexpected behavior.

For example this compiles without error and prints true when executed:

let x = -1
let y: Int? = nil
print(y < x) // true

Similarly, the following compiles without error and prints 1, despite the fact that the argument to the left of the ?? is a non-optional value:

let z = 1
print(z ?? 7)

Both of these examples represent cases where the silent behavior could potentially hide bugs or confuse readers of the code, and where we should instead reject the code as a type error.

For example in the first case the fact that y was not unwrapped could be a bug that is missed in a larger body of code where the declaration of y occurs farther away from the use. Likewise, a reader of the second example might be under the impression that z is an optional if the use of z is actually farther from the declaration. It may also be that the author of the code intended to make z optional and add code that assigns to z in ways that result in nil, but forgot to add that code.

The type checker currently has a hack to diagnose comparing nil to non-optional values, but this hack only works for literal nil.

This proposal will not affect the existing coercion used for implicitly unwrapped optionals, so for example the following code will continue to work:

let x: Int! = 5
let y: Int? = 7
print(x < y) // true

It will also not affect coercion in the context of the assignment statement, so this will also continue to work:

let b: Bool = ...
var v: Int?

if b {
  v = nil
} else {
  v = 7
}

Furthermore, this proposal introduces variants of the equality (==, !=) and identity (===, !==) operators that accept arguments of mixed optionality, allowing code like this to continue to work:

let x: Int? = 2
let y: Int = 3
if x == y {
  ...
}

let dict: [String: Int]
if dict["key"] == y {
  ...
}

Detailed design

The type checker needs to be updated to remove the current nil-literal hack and replace it with code to explicitly disable the coercion in operator argument contexts.

In Optional.swift, we need to add these overloads:

public func == <T: Equatable>(lhs: T?, rhs: T) -> Bool
public func == <T: Equatable>(lhs: T, rhs: T?) -> Bool

public func != <T: Equatable>(lhs: T?, rhs: T) -> Bool
public func != <T: Equatable>(lhs: T, rhs: T?) -> Bool

In Policy.swift, we need to add these overloads:

/// Returns `true` iff `lhs` and `rhs` are references to the same object
/// instance (in other words, are identical pointers).
///
/// - SeeAlso: `Equatable`, `==`
public func === (lhs: AnyObject, rhs: AnyObject) -> Bool
public func === (lhs: AnyObject?, rhs: AnyObject) -> Bool
public func === (lhs: AnyObject, rhs: AnyObject?) -> Bool

/// Returns `true` iff `lhs` and `rhs` are references to different object
/// instances (in other words, are different pointers).
///
/// - SeeAlso: `Equatable`, `!=`
public func !== (lhs: AnyObject, rhs: AnyObject) -> Bool
public func !== (lhs: AnyObject?, rhs: AnyObject) -> Bool
pubilc func !== (lhs: AnyObject, rhs: AnyObject?) -> Bool

In Builtin.swift, we need to add these overloads:

/// Returns `true` iff `t0` is identical to `t1`; i.e. if they are both
/// `nil` or they both represent the same type.
public func == (t0: Any.Type, t1: Any.Type) -> Bool
public func == (t0: Any.Type?, t1: Any.Type) -> Bool
public func == (t0: Any.Type, t1: Any.Type?) -> Bool

/// Returns `false` iff `t0` is identical to `t1`; i.e. if they are both
/// `nil` or they both represent the same type.
public func != (t0: Any.Type, t1: Any.Type) -> Bool
public func != (t0: Any.Type?, t1: Any.Type) -> Bool
public func != (t0: Any.Type, t1: Any.Type?) -> Bool

One unfortunate consequence of adding these overloads is that equality and identity comparisons of non-optional values to literal nil will now type check, e.g.:

let i = 1
if i == nil {   // compiles without error
  print("should never happen")
}

This is consistent behavior from a type-checking perspective, but looks odd in practice. There may be implementation changes we can make to eliminate this behavior.

Impact on existing code

This is a breaking change for Swift 3.

Existing code using ordered comparison operators (<, <=, >, and >=) will need to change to explicitly test optionality (for example via if let), cast to Optional(), or force-unwrap one of the operands being used with an operator.

Existing code using the nil-coalescing operator (??) with a non-Optional left-hand side will need to be updated, but the update is trivial: simply remove the use of the operator.

Existing code using the equality and identity operators (==, !=, ===, and !==) can remain unchanged.

The expectation is that this will result in relatively small impact for most code.

For example:

if x < y {} // old

if let x = x, x < y { // potential fix if you don't care about x being nil
}

if x! < y { // another potential fix if you know x is non-nil
}

In a survey of the following projects, ranging from 2k lines to 21k lines (including whitespace and comments), the following changes were required:

  • Alamofire: No changes.
  • Dollar: No changes.
  • RxSwift: Two removals of ?? due to the left-hand side not being an optional.
  • SwiftyJSON: No changes.
  • swiftpm: One removal of ?? due to the left-hand side not being an optional. One explicit cast to Optional() that looks like it might be due to a type checker bug.

There is a prototyped implementation available for review including compiler and standard library modifications (but no test modifications or new tests at this time).

Alternatives considered

One suggestion was to continue to allow the coercion by default, but add a parameter attribute, @noncoercing, that would disable the coercion for a given parameter and could be used both with operator functions, and non-operator functions.