Is force cast really bad and should always avoid it?

Question

I started to use swiftLint and noticed one of the best practices for Swift is to avoid force cast. However I used it a lot when handling tableView, collectionView for cells

Answer 1

"Force Cast" has its place, when you know that what you're casting to is of that type for example.

Say we know that myView has a subview that is a UILabel with the tag 1, we can go ahead and force down cast from UIView to UILabel safety:

myLabel = myView.viewWithTag(1) as! UILabel

Alternatively, the safer option is to use a guard.

guard let myLabel = myView.viewWithTag(1) as? UILabel else {
  ... //ABORT MISSION
}

The latter is safer as it obviously handles any bad cases but the former, is easier. So really it comes down to personal preference, considering whether its something that might be changed in the future or if you're not certain whether what you are unwrapping will be what you want to cast it to then in that situation a guard would always be the right choice.

To summarise: If you know exactly what it will be then you can force cast otherwise if theres the slightest chance it might be something else use a guard