It's also worth mentioning that there has been some discussion about extending dot short in other directions as well. It's syntactic sugar that could support more than one (non-overlapping) resolution. This use for failable initializers (and failable factories?) would just be one way to extend it. For reference, here are the prior threads I was able to find: [Proposal Idea] dot shorthand for instance members and Dot notation as shorthand in subscripts and functions.