<regex> still does not work for gcc--any ideas why? It doesn't make sense to me since the Boost project has shown how to make it work. What don't I understand why implementing this so hard?
When I tried to find out when <regex> will be fully implemented all I can find is a reference showing that it is not implemented.
They are a volunteer project, like much of open source. When someone finds time to do it, it will happen. (personally, I can use boost.regex if I need it, the lack of <codecvt> in gcc is more annoying to me)
Overall, it is probably true, although there are a few C++11 features that Microsoft implemented back in VS2010, and gcc still didn't.
GCC is just too old and big and difficult to work on, LLVM/clang++/libc++ had a better idea: start from scratch.
GCC is just too old and big and difficult to work on
This is not something that I had not considered, maybe this is obvious to you, but the idea that gcc has become so complicated over the years that nothing is simple anymore had not occurred to me.
I expect that anything for which a decent Boost option exists already is not at the top of the list of things to do, because there's already a decent Boost option people can use.