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

In cases where you are really sure the object should be of the specified type it would be OK to down cast. However, I use the following global function in those cases to get a more meaningful result in the logs which is in my eyes a better approach:

public func castSafely(_ object: Any, expectedType: T.Type) -> T {
    guard let typedObject = object as? T else {
        fatalError("Expected object: \(object) to be of type: \(expectedType)")
    }
    return typedObject
}

Example usage:

class AnalysisViewController: UIViewController {

    var analysisView: AnalysisView {
        return castSafely(self.view, expectedType: AnalysisView.self)
    }

    override func loadView() {
        view = AnalysisView()
    }
}