Like most software engineers I'm not qualified to analyze what will or won't infringe on a specific patent, so I'm not going to make any such claims, but attempting to patent programming language features from Swift is certainly a chilling move by Apple. @Chris_Lattner3, @tkremenek, and other (former/present) Apple people have emphasized how great this is for the Swift community, but that's a very limited perspective. What about other languages? What about other communities? Is a new, from-scratch language design that uses optional chaining open to legal attack by Apple?
If Apple's intentions are honorable here they need to make it abundantly clear what they will and will not do with these patents, preferably in a legally-binding manner. Otherwise they're just spreading the software patent minefield into new territory and poisoning the well of goodwill that they've built by open-sourcing Swift in the first place.