1) There are certain basics like regex support that people are upset
at Apple for not implementing because it seems like such an important
part of the concept of strings.
Agreed, and I made this argument many times while there. Part of the
problem is the impedance mismatch issue — Apple would want to use
ICU because of its good Unicode support, but the way the ICU APIs
are written generally requires copying the string to a temporary
buffer (especially if you consider thread-safety.) There has been
talk of extending ICU regexps to support plug-in string storage,
which would be more efficient, and as far as I can tell, the whole
regexps-for-Cocoa feature gets hung up on waiting for that, year
after year.
I thought I read on the Xcode users list that Xcode is using ICU for
regex find-and-replace, so it's too bad the rest of us can't use it.
Unfortunately, I think filing bug reports on this is a waste of time
at this point. I'm still using AGRegex, which is based on a pretty
ancient PCRE, but it's predated by (at least) MOKit and
OFRegularExpression:
