UITableView in Swift

Also see matt’s answer which contains the second half of the solution

Let’s find a solution without creating custom subclasses or nibs

The real problem is in the fact that Swift distinguishes between objects that can be empty (nil) and objects that can’t be empty. If you don’t register a nib for your identifier, then dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier can return nil.

That means we have to declare the variable as optional:

var cell : UITableViewCell?

and we have to cast using as? not as

//variable type is inferred
var cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier("CELL") as? UITableViewCell

if cell == nil {
    cell = UITableViewCell(style: UITableViewCellStyle.Value1, reuseIdentifier: "CELL")
}

// we know that cell is not empty now so we use ! to force unwrapping but you could also define cell as
// let cell = (tableView.dequeue... as? UITableViewCell) ?? UITableViewCell(style: ...)

cell!.textLabel.text = "Baking Soda"
cell!.detailTextLabel.text = "1/2 cup"

cell!.textLabel.text = "Hello World"

return cell