johne

What do you gain by wrapping Objective-C around your regex?

Me being vastly more productive. Extract all the http like URL's from a string and print them:

  for(id match in [searchString componentsMatchedByRegex:@"\\bhttps?://[a-zA-Z0-9\\-.]+(?:(?:/[a-zA-Z0-9\\-._?,'+\\&%$=~*!():@\\\\]*)+)?"]) {
    printf("URL: %s\n", [match UTF8String]);
  }

O.. M.. F.. G.. I had no idea they did this. I mean, what is the point? Talk about "not invented here" mentality: "I've got a fantastic idea! Unicode already has an official name for every Unicode character, so let's throw all of that out and come up with our own names that have no relation to what those Unicode guys did! And while we're at it, HTML4, HTML5? Version numbers are for pu$$7$s, so lets drop that too, and then randomly throw in a few hundred extra character entities every two to eighteen months for a fresh 'What's new' bullet point!"

A JSON parser at ~2K lines: https://github.com/johnezang/JSONKit I'm the author, so I'm obviously biased :). It has strict Unicode standard UTF-8 parsing ("passes" http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-test.txt) and has a whiz-bang LRU cache with a clever aging replacement policy that saves lots of time by reusing already seen and instantiated immutable objects (think JSON dictionaries: the keys in "key": value pairs tend to repeat an awful lot). A further benefit is this saves lots of memory too. For converting JSON to 'native' ObjC/Foundation objects, it's faster than the other ObjC JSON libraries by 2-10x (HEAVILY dependent on the JSON being parsed, typical is 2-4x), and serializing ObjC -> JSON is (usually) even faster.

So, in short, it's possible to write a very high performance JSON serializer and deserializer in ObjC in ~2K lines of code. For JSONKit, most it is actually pure C (which in turn uses Core Foundation, which is a pure C API interface version for the equivalent native ObjC objects), with public API ObjC stub bindings making use of the C code.