Re: 3rd Party Nonsense (was Re: Regular Expressions?)
Re: 3rd Party Nonsense (was Re: Regular Expressions?)
- Subject: Re: 3rd Party Nonsense (was Re: Regular Expressions?)
- From: Alastair Houghton <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:36:55 +0100
On 10 Jun 2008, at 15:16, Chris Ridd wrote:
On 10 Jun 2008, at 05:12, Mark Munz wrote:
Just wishing for the problem to go away or blaming external criteria
will almost guarantee that nothing gets done. Filing bugs is how you,
the developer, communicate your needs to Apple.
Since ICU is open source, the other productive thing to do would be
to give the ICU folks a hand at writing whatever bits of gunk are
required by Apple.
"The ICU folks" actually includes Apple, since they have at least one
person working on ICU (IIRC ICU was one of the results of Apple's
collaboration with IBM on Taligent). As I understand it, the main
reason it isn't fully exposed is that ICU is primarily a C++ library
and there have and continue to be binary compatibility issues with C++
APIs.
I think Apple is likely to add CFRegularExpression and a bridged
NSRegularExpression at some point, and very probably a load of CF/
NSString and NSScanner APIs to go with them, but it isn't a trivial
amount of work and I imagine they will want to think it through
carefully before deciding on the API, not to mention the supported
regexp syntax(es). By contrast, most of the regexp frameworks
currently available are thin wrappers around an existing regular
expression engine and have been knocked up quickly to fill a need.
More thought needs to go into a system API and since CFStrings can
exist in a number of different internal storage formats it may even
make sense for Apple to do its own regexp implementation to achieve
the best performance.
Anyway, all of that is up to them. As others have said, filing bug
reports is the way to push for this work if you want it done. Whether
working on ICU or not will make things happen faster is something that
only people inside Apple could tell us. My guess is that it won't
make any difference, but it's just a guess.
Kind regards,
Alastair.
--
http://alastairs-place.net
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