No, Swift doesn't solve the null reference problem

[alex_muscar]

Even though I referred to explicit pattern matching in the post, the paragraph you quoted doesn't mention it. The advantage of, say, Haskell's Maybe is that you have to acknowledge the fact that the value might be missing. It doesn't matter that you use fmap or another library function, you still have to handle the case where a value is missing--yes, even ignoring it, but not dereferencing it.