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Twenty-five years of curl
- tomcam 4y agoA remarkable gift to the world.
- avg_dev 4y agoIndeed. I really enjoyed the article, and I am grateful for the tool as well. My favorite section was "Staying relevant" which explains (IMO) how it is possible for this project to have not only kept such staying power but exploded in use. Also the "2019" section made me lol: > I started working for wolfSSL, doing curl full-time. It just took 21 years to make curl my job. Finally: thank you to Daniel Stenberg, Rafael Sagula, and the many, many contributors for making this tool.
- bbbbzzz1 4y agoA good example of how driven individual can have a positive impact in a domain (with help from all other contributors too of course)
- benatkin 4y agoI wasn't sure what "driven" meant despite hearing it all the time, so I looked in the dictionary: "Someone who is driven is so determined to achieve something or be successful that all of their behavior is directed toward this aim" That fits with this early part of the article: "The concept behind curl development has always been to gradually and iteratively improve all aspects of it. Keep behavior, but enhance the code, add test cases, improve the documentation. Over and over, year after year. It never stops. As the timeline below helps showing. Similarly, there was no sudden specific moment when suddenly curl became popular and the number of users skyrocketed. Instead, the number of users and the popularity of the tool and library has gradually and continuously grown. In 1998 there were few users. By 2010 there were hundreds of millions." That very much typifies "driven". However, there is this at the end of his about page at https://daniel.haxx.se/about.html https://daniel.haxx.se/about.html ## Future I never plan never far ahead. LOL!!!
- filleokus 4y agoI agree, and think its quite fitting that Daniel Stenberg received a price from the Swedish king (or really from a Swedish engineering association) a couple a years ago: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2017/10/20/my-night-at-the-museum https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2017/10/20/my-night-at-the-museu... Good to see someone who had such a positive influence get recognised outside of our bubble
- asicsp 4y agoSee also: "Curl 25 Years Online Celebration" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35092501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35092501
- pbreit 4y agoHTTP client libraries on the various languages still seems so lousy with excessive boilerplate and all sorts of complexity to handle cases that are beyond rare.
- alliao 4y agosoftware development with craftsmanship mindset is a beautiful thing
- monksy 4y agoBut is the original creator welcome in the US?
- davideg 4y ago2020 In November, in the middle of Covid, I finally got a US visa.[1] [1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/11/09/a-us-visa-in-937-days/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/11/09/a-us-visa-in-937-days... Edit: formating
- jraph 4y ago937 days to get a visa, that's quite timely. International conference organizers ought to plan a bit in advance if they want to schedule things in the US. … or just don't organize stuff in the US.
- mort96 4y agoIt's not so bad for most people. If you're in one of the countries the US likes, you can apply for an ESTA which lets you stay in the country for up to 3 months or something; way longer than you need for a conference. It was very painless when I travelled to the US from Norway for a holiday some years back. Of course, it's not as easy if you're not from one of the 40 countries eligible for the Visa Waiver Program. But from what I can see, Daniel is in and from Sweden, which is one of those countries.
- Moru 4y ago> when I was refused to board the flight due to unspecified "problems with my ESTA". As my employer at the time, Mozilla engaged some people on both the American as well as the Swedish side to try to figure out what was wrong and what we could do to correct the situation. Unfortunately, no one would offer any clues or information about why I was denied It's apparently not that easy when the US decides it's not enough.
- 4y ago
- fsckboy 4y ago25 years of being told I should switch, and I still i never GET the time to learned curl's syntax! don't worry, i'm sure i'll wget to it soon
- jraph 4y agoI use both :-) Wget to download stuff in an interactive shell (shorter, and I know its -c switch to continue interrupted downloads), curl for anything else.
- atoav 4y agoI would also say both has it's place. Wget is the downloader, curl is for when I really need control over the request, headers, body and so on (so interactions with APIs, testing, ...)
- ricardo81 4y agoI think I'm just young enough for curl to have become my habit (started web dev in the late 90s). I feel the same way about wget. --help every time.
- flerchin 4y agoOpen the network tab in your browser's dev-tools. Right click on any interesting request and "Copy as cURL." Now you're well on your way to using cURL to do something interesting.
- verhovsky 4y agohttps://curlconverter.com/wget/ https://curlconverter.com/wget/ will turn that curl command into a Wget command.
- ufmace 4y agoI never got the hang of it either. I still prefer httpie for having a better syntax and better support of plugins AFAICT.
- quijoteuniv 4y agoPeople often want to change the world, well… here it is.
- keyle 4y agoIt's worth imagining if curl was invented today... How large would the team be behind it? How many stars on Github? How many open pull-requests? How big would the patreon be? The Github sponsors? What Fortune100 would sponsor it? The open issues count? The build steps? The installer packages? The docker image? The docker-compose? The rust rewrite? Wiki pages? The reactjs website? The nextjs rewrite? The CSS framework that would be born from the rewrite? The incomplete documentation, because of the Discord? How big would the Discord be? What about the subreddit born to cry about the lack of documentation because of the Discord? What about the startup that would offer you curl as a service? Curl as a lambda? Curl one click install in CPanel? How many milliseconds would curl take to just start up? How much RAM would it take? How many developer resume would claim to be proficient at curl? Somethings are amazing because they were made at a time where things were simply made... Not taking a stab at anyone or anything in particular, just reminiscing and imagining...
- ketanmaheshwari 4y agoI have a few questions about curl: -- Curl claims that it supports so many protocols but I do not see many examples where they are in action, for instance, how to use ssh protocol to perform transfer between two machines? Where can I find such examples? -- Are there any examples of a fully functional high-level data motion tool that is based on Curl? -- Has anyone used Curl to perform data transfers at large scale such as terabytes of data? I would love to read more about it if there are any pointers describing such transfers.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago> for instance, how to use ssh protocol to perform transfer between two machines? Where can I find such examples? That's out of scope for cURL, use `scp` for that. > Are there any examples of a fully functional high-level data motion tool that is based on Curl? What's data motion? > Has anyone used Curl to perform data transfers at large scale such as terabytes of data? I would love to read more about it if there are any pointers describing such transfers. There's a few posts on Stack Overflow about that, but they go up to gigabytes. cURL is not the best solution for transfering terabytes of data. http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/HOWTO_move_data.html http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/HOWTO_move_data.html seems to be a good overview of the challenges (and tools) to use to securely and reliably transfer terabytes of data, referencing rsync, bbcp, bittorrent, etc.
- rjh29 4y ago> Curl claims that it supports so many protocols but I do not see many examples where they are in action, for instance, how to use ssh protocol to perform transfer between two machines? Where can I find such examples? You could try it yourself! The man page is pretty good.
- charonn0 4y ago> Curl claims that it supports so many protocols but I do not see many examples where they are in action, for instance, how to use ssh protocol to perform transfer between two machines? Where can I find such examples? SSH file transfers use either SCP:// or SFTP:// urls, not SSH:// urls. >> curl sftp://public.example.com/file.txt
- ilovecurl 4y agoI love curl. It's become one of my favorite pieces of software partly due to the fact that I use it so often but mostly because when I do run into problems, the documentation is so good. Thanks for making useful stuff!
- fefe23 4y ago[flagged]
- mrkeen 4y ago> with almost 150 CVEs since its inception. Just now for the 25nd aniversary half a dozen were added to the list. These ones? 141. We are not aware of any exploit of this flaw. Severity: Low 140. We are not aware of any exploit of this flaw. Severity: Low 139. We are not aware of any exploit of this flaw. Severity: Low 138. We are not aware of any exploit of this flaw. Severity: Medium 137. We are not aware of any exploit of this flaw. Severity: Low ... > The dependency list is an absolute security nightmare: Is it the thirteen items on this list: https://curl.se/docs/libs.html https://curl.se/docs/libs.html ? "You can build curl without them" > Why is anyone trusting software that needs this many security updates for such a comparably trivial task? At 148299 lines of C, perhaps it has more uses than you give it credit for?
- racl101 4y agocURL rocks.