When you do need an integer counter, the best way to have it is to create a new collection consisting of (index, element) pairs. Swift (and many other languages) make this easy:

  for (index, element) in collection.enumerated()

There are some cases where the C style for loop is the most natural way to express something. For example, looping over NULL-terminated array of pointers is nicely expressed with one (Swift 2-ish pseudocode):

  for var cursor = ptr; cursor.pointee != nil; cursor += 1

But these situations are really rare, and when you do encounter them, it's not a big deal to transform them into a while loop:

  var cursor = ptr
  while cursor.pointee != nil {
      defer { cursor += 1 }
      ...do stuff...
  }