> So I made a package that wraps native RegExp. When 0.19 was released, I couldn't upgrade because of those 5 lines. The regex package eventually got regex.fromstring(). So I could've upgraded.

The last commit to the regex package was in May 2018, and Elm 0.19 was released later in August. https://github.com/elm/regex/commits/1.0.0/

So it seems like by the time of the official release you could have replaced your five lines with `Regex.fromString`.

But the missing Intl API is definitely a huge pain, and I understand that you were switching away if you needed it extensively. Or expected to want other sync APIs wrapped.

A common way to solve something like this is with proxy objects like in https://github.com/anmolitor/intl-proxy but it does not give access to every feature in a nice way.

I went the route of least resistance and built the Elm compiler without the Kernel code check. But in the past few years I hardly needed that anymore.