I had the opposite experience. All I needed was a way to do a simple GET. That's it (and that's all it still is, by the way). Instead of spending half an hou

I had the opposite experience. All I needed was a way to do a simple GET. That's it (and that's all it still is, by the way). Instead of spending half an hour writing the code, I decided to use libcurl---that's what it's for, right? Until I found it wasn't installed on some of our test machines (it was needed for testing, not for production and for reasons beyond my pay grade, libcurl was not available on the machines). Then I thought, well, I could include the libcurl into our vendor repo. It worked, but it was a nightmare to use. It took way too long to figure out the proper "configure" options to use for what systems, it nearly tripled the time to build it on the build servers, and even then, it was hit-or-miss. After several years of this misery, I removed libcurl, and wrote what I should have years earlier. Using libcurl as a dependency did NOT save us any time.