That's a very gentle way to describe the agony of string processing in Swift :-). We have written a few shortcut libraries ourselves, but we actually don't end

That's a very gentle way to describe the agony of string processing in Swift :-). We have written a few shortcut libraries ourselves, but we actually don't end up writing a great deal of string processing code in practice because most of our operations are expressed in a higher level query language that gets compiled down to lower-level operator implementations (which only get written once). The vast majority of our code (maybe like a lot of systems?) ends up being more about the management of the broader data & processing environment that coordinates everything.