41 ms·

Curl is inside 22,734 Steam games

153 points by TangerineDream 2y ago

tinfoilboy 2y ago
I believe CURL is built into Unreal as the HTTP library of choice for desktop platforms. Just to add to the mindboggling number of games that may rely on it.
bradhe 2y ago
[flagged]
- sammy2255 2y ago
  Is it?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- hnthr_w_y 2y ago
  does this invalidate the idea? i get the core idea, there _are_ some libraries that nobody has ever heard of but for example used in just a few places, one of them being lets say jquery and that creates a misleading example of being some super popular library. curl is not one of these examples, it is very, very, widespread.
- pdpi 2y ago
  There's Unity and Unreal games on the steamdb listing, but there's also several other proprietary engines, both big (Source, RED) and small (all sorts of small indie games)
- dontlaugh 2y ago
  It isn't bundled. However, it is extremely common because it works on any platform. It's great at filling in for platforms where you don't get forced to use the first party one (like Xbox).
lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y ago
Seriously question. What makes curl so special? Couldn't the same be said e.g. for wget?
- Uvix 2y ago
  Curl ships as a library; wget is only available as a command-line tool, I believe.
  - jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
    libwget exists too, and is licensed under LGPL. The wget/wget2 tool itself is GPL3 licensed. The "MIT" license is less complicated to comply with than LGPL, but that's probably not why it's getting chosen.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- detinho 2y ago
  Don't know about wget, but curl also provides libcurl [0] so you can embed it on your software. Also curl supports a wider range of protocols, as can be seen on [0]. [0] https://curl.se/libcurl/ https://curl.se/libcurl/
- peterpost2 2y ago
  Curl is an ancient tool in internet terms and runs on pretty much everything.
- dazzawazza 2y ago
  Game dev here: * it's got a license that allows it to be embedded * it's well known amongst game devs * its deals very well with all the mind-numbingly uninteresting network issues game devs don't care about It's mostly used for analytics, fetching news, RSS feeds etc. Seperate proprietry libs are used for the CDN side of game dev. Basically it works and the gamedev industry is incredibly conservative about new/different tech. Alas it's also greedy. I know of games making $1 million a day that pay nothing in to the curl.
dijit 2y ago
Now check OpenSSL. Ubiquity does not always equate to quality, sadly. But curl is better than anything you could reasonably develop yourself in C++.
- semiquaver 2y ago
  Sorry, are you implying that curl is not of high quality?
  - jalk 2y ago
    No - the opposite
  - dijit 2y ago
    No, just that inclusion is not a signifier. Curl is really good, and worthy of its position- especially as hobby software
- leni536 2y ago
  > But curl is better than anything you could reasonably develop yourself in C++. Hey, Boost.Beast is alright.
  - dijit 2y ago
    Boost is super heavy, and I've heard people refer to it's inclusion of solutions as a sign of a poor game programmer (I do not give such judgement, but just passing that sentiment along).
    - leni536 2y ago
      Game programmers have all kind of wrong notions about C++ programming.
      - dijit 2y ago
        Yet they seem to be the only people capable of making software that can render text on translucent backdrops at 144Hz.
stabbles 2y ago
[flagged]
- yurishimo 2y ago
  Probably when companies start paying him for it.
  - alexvitkov 2y ago
    If you want billion dollar corporations to pay you then you should probably include a clause "this is free unless you're a billion dollar corporation in which case you have to pay me" in the license. Ah but then it's not free software and the FSF will frown at you, because billion dollar corporations are people too. Tough luck.
- janfoeh 2y ago
  Why not let the man be proud of his work? I'd be if I were in his shoes. Out of curiosity, if that bothers you, for whatever reason — why'd you come into this thread? Wouldn't it have been better for everyone involved to just skip it?
- udev4096 2y ago
  Why are you so upset about it? Curl is big and it's being used literally everywhere while having little to no appreciation from corporations who use it, just like ffmpeg
  - galangalalgol 2y ago
    And when a cve is found everyone yells and says why doesn't someone rewrite it in rust. It is freakishly huge, and the tests and fuzzing are very good at this point. I do wonder if there isn't a subset of the functionality that is used much more frequently that we could RiR.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  Any person who's used an Internet-connected device has likely had curl involved. I'd be proud too if my work was one of the backbone components to modern society.
xyst 2y ago
The author of the blog post is also the original author or cURL.
- dgb23 2y ago
  Which makes the final remark quite funny: > Not too shabby for a hobby.
  - Aissen 2y ago
    It's a reference to a hater's comment (which became a meme slogan/catch phrase): https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/04/22/curl-is-just-the-hobby/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/04/22/curl-is-just-the-hobb...
- yelnatz 2y ago
  I remember when he was arguing with an AI (that posted a bug report) not knowing it was AI. https://hackerone.com/reports/2298307 https://hackerone.com/reports/2298307 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2HzKY5imTE&t=272s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2HzKY5imTE&t=272s
  - shepherdjerred 2y ago
    Wow, what a frustrating situation.
- outime 2y ago
  Given that there is one or more weekly posts from his website here [1] for some reason, I'd suspect most of the people know this fact already. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=haxx.se https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=haxx.se
superlupo 2y ago
And how many of them are donating to or sponsoring the cURL project?
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >And how many of them are donating to or sponsoring the cURL project? A lot of them are likely using it as part of a game engine that they pay for, those game engines should be supporting the curl project, assuming you believe they have an obligation to do so.
  - phyrex 2y ago
    There’s a good chance they do. Big tech contributes a ton to open source, I can’t imagine that’ll be different with unreal.
- schneems 2y ago
  I would advocate an additional method of supporting open source: contributing. Doesn’t even have to be features. Bug fixes or docs are amazing. Heck even opening really good issues where it’s clear the dev spent time getting a good reproduction. Daniel is a full time maintainer who would benefit from additional income. Many small projects have maintainers that a few dollars might be helpful but help would be more helpful. I went to some open source confs to promote a book I wrote (https://howtoopensource.dev https://howtoopensource.dev) and free service (https://www.codetriage.com https://www.codetriage.com) and asked people working at booths for large companies if they can contribute to open source at their day job. Only one person had a positive example and in that case their team was literally blocked on the fix and there was no workaround. The rest seemed confused about why they should be spending work time to report issues or fix bugs. Some genuinely didn’t realize that was helpful and that “contributing to open source” doesn’t just mean releasing and maintaining your own code. So yes, please fund the software you use, also time and attention is valuable too. Last tip: If you want to make a habit of it, get it tracked like regular work. “Hey, is feature X done, can we move this card over?” …”Actually I still need to report an upstream issue before we are totally done, I’ll make another work item for it and get it checked off today”. If you feel like you would get pushback for that, then start smaller, by filing issues and talking about it after the fact. Most other engineers and quite a few managers see this as going above and beyond for your job.
csmeyer 2y ago
This post (just thinking of use of Unix tools within game software) reminds me of that bug a few years back within steam itself that accidentally deleted user’s root directories https://youtu.be/qzZLvw2AdvM?si=F-Aq9Ha_GKEZH006 https://youtu.be/qzZLvw2AdvM?si=F-Aq9Ha_GKEZH006
flerchin 2y ago
Curl is great! Stenberg and other maintainers should be proud.
thoronton 2y ago
https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
Pulcinella 2y ago
3 Billion devices run Java (disparaging). 22,734 games utilize Curl (glorifying).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rldjbpin 2y ago
  one party is a company trying to sell stuff. the other is a guy being proud of his work and lowkey bragging. either ways this is a one-off instance. not meme worthy just yet.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  One is boring, the other is fun. One is in your face every time you install related software, the other isn't.
codedokode 2y ago
Is curl API that good? It looks a little weird to me, for example, you need to set URL as an "option", and it is not "optional" despite the name. Wouldn't it be better to pass URL and method to "curl_easy_perform" function? Furthermore, it seems to use "set option" function with magic values to control in-memory cookie storage which is even weirder: https://curl.se/libcurl/c/CURLOPT_COOKIELIST.html https://curl.se/libcurl/c/CURLOPT_COOKIELIST.html Also, curl seems to have no built-in function to save data? The user has to implement write callback themselves? Also, regarding options, curl uses a single function for setting options of different types (numbers, booleans, strings) so typing for an option value cannot be used. Is that a good idea? What C developers usually use in such cases?
- dncornholio 2y ago
  Why should a transport library deal with storing data? And you can crique the design I guess, but it works and it works well. Sometimes that is enough.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
  Your unfamiliarity with C aside, curl is more than its API.
- Sharlin 2y ago
  Unfortunately C libraries aren't known for their use of strong typing or the "make invalid states unrepresentable" paradigm, and C itself is very weakly typed so it's not even feasible to write strongly typesafe APIs in C.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

I believe CURL is built into Unreal as the HTTP library of choice for desktop platforms. Just to add to the mindboggling number of games that may rely on it.

bradhe 2y ago

[flagged]

sammy2255 2y ago
Is it?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
hnthr_w_y 2y ago
does this invalidate the idea? i get the core idea, there _are_ some libraries that nobody has ever heard of but for example used in just a few places, one of them being lets say jquery and that creates a misleading example of being some super popular library. curl is not one of these examples, it is very, very, widespread.
pdpi 2y ago
There's Unity and Unreal games on the steamdb listing, but there's also several other proprietary engines, both big (Source, RED) and small (all sorts of small indie games)
dontlaugh 2y ago
It isn't bundled. However, it is extremely common because it works on any platform. It's great at filling in for platforms where you don't get forced to use the first party one (like Xbox).

lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y ago

Seriously question. What makes curl so special? Couldn't the same be said e.g. for wget?

Uvix 2y ago
Curl ships as a library; wget is only available as a command-line tool, I believe.
- jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
  libwget exists too, and is licensed under LGPL. The wget/wget2 tool itself is GPL3 licensed. The "MIT" license is less complicated to comply with than LGPL, but that's probably not why it's getting chosen.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
detinho 2y ago
Don't know about wget, but curl also provides libcurl [0] so you can embed it on your software. Also curl supports a wider range of protocols, as can be seen on [0]. [0] https://curl.se/libcurl/ https://curl.se/libcurl/
peterpost2 2y ago
Curl is an ancient tool in internet terms and runs on pretty much everything.
dazzawazza 2y ago
Game dev here: * it's got a license that allows it to be embedded * it's well known amongst game devs * its deals very well with all the mind-numbingly uninteresting network issues game devs don't care about It's mostly used for analytics, fetching news, RSS feeds etc. Seperate proprietry libs are used for the CDN side of game dev. Basically it works and the gamedev industry is incredibly conservative about new/different tech. Alas it's also greedy. I know of games making $1 million a day that pay nothing in to the curl.

dijit 2y ago

Now check OpenSSL. Ubiquity does not always equate to quality, sadly. But curl is better than anything you could reasonably develop yourself in C++.

semiquaver 2y ago
Sorry, are you implying that curl is not of high quality?
- jalk 2y ago
  No - the opposite
- dijit 2y ago
  No, just that inclusion is not a signifier. Curl is really good, and worthy of its position- especially as hobby software
leni536 2y ago
> But curl is better than anything you could reasonably develop yourself in C++. Hey, Boost.Beast is alright.
- dijit 2y ago
  Boost is super heavy, and I've heard people refer to it's inclusion of solutions as a sign of a poor game programmer (I do not give such judgement, but just passing that sentiment along).
  - leni536 2y ago
    Game programmers have all kind of wrong notions about C++ programming.
    - dijit 2y ago
      Yet they seem to be the only people capable of making software that can render text on translucent backdrops at 144Hz.

stabbles 2y ago

[flagged]

yurishimo 2y ago
Probably when companies start paying him for it.
- alexvitkov 2y ago
  If you want billion dollar corporations to pay you then you should probably include a clause "this is free unless you're a billion dollar corporation in which case you have to pay me" in the license. Ah but then it's not free software and the FSF will frown at you, because billion dollar corporations are people too. Tough luck.
janfoeh 2y ago
Why not let the man be proud of his work? I'd be if I were in his shoes. Out of curiosity, if that bothers you, for whatever reason — why'd you come into this thread? Wouldn't it have been better for everyone involved to just skip it?
udev4096 2y ago
Why are you so upset about it? Curl is big and it's being used literally everywhere while having little to no appreciation from corporations who use it, just like ffmpeg
- galangalalgol 2y ago
  And when a cve is found everyone yells and says why doesn't someone rewrite it in rust. It is freakishly huge, and the tests and fuzzing are very good at this point. I do wonder if there isn't a subset of the functionality that is used much more frequently that we could RiR.
ceejayoz 2y ago
Any person who's used an Internet-connected device has likely had curl involved. I'd be proud too if my work was one of the backbone components to modern society.

xyst 2y ago

The author of the blog post is also the original author or cURL.

dgb23 2y ago
Which makes the final remark quite funny: > Not too shabby for a hobby.
- Aissen 2y ago
  It's a reference to a hater's comment (which became a meme slogan/catch phrase): https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/04/22/curl-is-just-the-hobby/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/04/22/curl-is-just-the-hobb...
yelnatz 2y ago
I remember when he was arguing with an AI (that posted a bug report) not knowing it was AI. https://hackerone.com/reports/2298307 https://hackerone.com/reports/2298307 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2HzKY5imTE&t=272s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2HzKY5imTE&t=272s
- shepherdjerred 2y ago
  Wow, what a frustrating situation.
outime 2y ago
Given that there is one or more weekly posts from his website here [1] for some reason, I'd suspect most of the people know this fact already. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=haxx.se https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=haxx.se

superlupo 2y ago

And how many of them are donating to or sponsoring the cURL project?

Suppafly 2y ago
>And how many of them are donating to or sponsoring the cURL project? A lot of them are likely using it as part of a game engine that they pay for, those game engines should be supporting the curl project, assuming you believe they have an obligation to do so.
- phyrex 2y ago
  There’s a good chance they do. Big tech contributes a ton to open source, I can’t imagine that’ll be different with unreal.
schneems 2y ago
I would advocate an additional method of supporting open source: contributing. Doesn’t even have to be features. Bug fixes or docs are amazing. Heck even opening really good issues where it’s clear the dev spent time getting a good reproduction. Daniel is a full time maintainer who would benefit from additional income. Many small projects have maintainers that a few dollars might be helpful but help would be more helpful. I went to some open source confs to promote a book I wrote (https://howtoopensource.dev https://howtoopensource.dev) and free service (https://www.codetriage.com https://www.codetriage.com) and asked people working at booths for large companies if they can contribute to open source at their day job. Only one person had a positive example and in that case their team was literally blocked on the fix and there was no workaround. The rest seemed confused about why they should be spending work time to report issues or fix bugs. Some genuinely didn’t realize that was helpful and that “contributing to open source” doesn’t just mean releasing and maintaining your own code. So yes, please fund the software you use, also time and attention is valuable too. Last tip: If you want to make a habit of it, get it tracked like regular work. “Hey, is feature X done, can we move this card over?” …”Actually I still need to report an upstream issue before we are totally done, I’ll make another work item for it and get it checked off today”. If you feel like you would get pushback for that, then start smaller, by filing issues and talking about it after the fact. Most other engineers and quite a few managers see this as going above and beyond for your job.

csmeyer 2y ago

This post (just thinking of use of Unix tools within game software) reminds me of that bug a few years back within steam itself that accidentally deleted user’s root directories https://youtu.be/qzZLvw2AdvM?si=F-Aq9Ha_GKEZH006 https://youtu.be/qzZLvw2AdvM?si=F-Aq9Ha_GKEZH006

flerchin 2y ago

Curl is great! Stenberg and other maintainers should be proud.

thoronton 2y ago

https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/

Pulcinella 2y ago

3 Billion devices run Java (disparaging). 22,734 games utilize Curl (glorifying).

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rldjbpin 2y ago
one party is a company trying to sell stuff. the other is a guy being proud of his work and lowkey bragging. either ways this is a one-off instance. not meme worthy just yet.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
One is boring, the other is fun. One is in your face every time you install related software, the other isn't.

codedokode 2y ago

Is curl API that good? It looks a little weird to me, for example, you need to set URL as an "option", and it is not "optional" despite the name. Wouldn't it be better to pass URL and method to "curl_easy_perform" function? Furthermore, it seems to use "set option" function with magic values to control in-memory cookie storage which is even weirder: https://curl.se/libcurl/c/CURLOPT_COOKIELIST.html https://curl.se/libcurl/c/CURLOPT_COOKIELIST.html Also, curl seems to have no built-in function to save data? The user has to implement write callback themselves? Also, regarding options, curl uses a single function for setting options of different types (numbers, booleans, strings) so typing for an option value cannot be used. Is that a good idea? What C developers usually use in such cases?

dncornholio 2y ago
Why should a transport library deal with storing data? And you can crique the design I guess, but it works and it works well. Sometimes that is enough.
cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
Your unfamiliarity with C aside, curl is more than its API.
Sharlin 2y ago
Unfortunately C libraries aren't known for their use of strong typing or the "make invalid states unrepresentable" paradigm, and C itself is very weakly typed so it's not even feasible to write strongly typesafe APIs in C.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]