If you want to talk about tested and battle-hardened code, make sure that you really have the older API :)
Foundation (and, by extension, NSHTTPRequest and NSURLConnection and such) is a few years older than cURL is. Foundation is really an implementation of the OpenStep API designed by Sun and NeXT. in 1993. cURL was released in 1997.
What do you lose by having a higher level of abstraction that is more flexible? Do you have raw profile data that shows that libcurl is significantly faster and performs better?
Newcomers to anything should be aware that old biases die hard and people on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt.
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]);
}
The Objective-C language (Smalltalk in C) was a nice idea (in the 80s...) but newcomers to iOS should be aware that the non-UI parts of the Cocoa/UIKit libraries are garbage compared to what C programmers have built over the past thirty years. I've had to replace enough of the ObjC libraries I've used with plain C that I just start with the C code now.