[Zev]

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.