Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“I Could Rewrite Curl”

daniel.haxx.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 193 posts

Re: “I Could Rewrite Curl”

#61

Post by flohofwoe »

parhamn wrote: post #30

Let's be honest here. Curl to 98% of people is http/1 requests with some post params and maybe json body, with some custom headers. Most language standard libs (which might be using libcurl) can facilitate writing that relatively quickly. And probably with a more 'modern' CLI. Curl though, is a very wide breadth project. It currently supports the following protocols: DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP,…

Yeah, very easy to write an HTTP client on top of Berkley sockets. Until chunked responses come into play, and HTTPS, and HTTP/2, and HTTP/3...

(this is actually something I'm very worried about, it used to be easy to cobble together a very basic HTTP client, not anymore with the new HTTP protocol versions, and all the bells and whistles).

Re: “I Could Rewrite Curl”

#62

Post by viraptor »

svantana wrote: post #32

All the best art, whether it be books, music, movies or software, make it seem so effortless. Ironically, it's when you see something bad that you kinda realize what goes into it. Like huh, hundreds of talented professionals worked really hard on this movie, and it still turned out this bad. Now imagine if I, a complete amateur, would give it a go...

> Now imagine if I, a complete amateur, would give it a go...

Now that one is actually tricky. I'd probably enjoy a mediocre amateur production more than a mediocre Hollywood production. It's a bit like the uncanny valley idea - it's easier to look at something meh than at something you know is a bit off from being good.

Re: “I Could Rewrite Curl”

#63

Post by bombcar »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #17

I wouldn't be surprised if the first comment is right that you could build a HTTP client sufficient for 90% of the usecases in ~100 lines or so. It's that other 10% that takes 90% of the time, effort and complexity, and for which having libraries like curl is invaluable.

I think there are two classes of cURL users - those who use it as a "let me download this file to the current folder" users who always forget the -O; and that use case is quite simple and seems it could be easily replaced.

And then there are those who use all the API features and realize it's a complex program.

But the missing link is that even the first use case has many complex edge-cases that aren't obvious at first.

Re: “I Could Rewrite Curl”

#64

Post by dcminter »

FriedrichN wrote: post #45
Hippocrates wrote: post #10

Just a little tangent but I think everyone should know cURL… not postman, not httpie or any other more “friendly” tool. cURL is the standard, pre-installed, do-everything, scriptable tool to interact with web APIs. I could say mostly the same stuff about knowing Bash. It separates the barely effective from hyper-effective individuals on simple day to day (programming) tasks.

I am always highly annoyed when someone has documentation for their web API and all that they provide is some postman collection of crap (or a crappy code example in an arbitrary language) and some vague abstract description of their API. Then I'll have to spend X amount of time on reverse engineering it to curl so I can see what's actually going on. Often I'll discover that they're doing really weird stuff (double b…

Doesn't Postman have a feature to allow exporting the request as curl and others though?

Re: “I Could Rewrite Curl”

#66

Post by DonHopkins »

bombcar wrote: post #46
ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in fact even the "simplest" editors seemed to take quite some time even for our heroes. Ken Thompson has stated [1] that he devoted a week out of a month for what I understand was the first version of ed(1): [...] [my wife] was gone a month to California and I allocated a week each to the shell, to the operating system, the shell, the editor, and the assembler, to reproduce itself [...] [1] https://www.princeton.…

An editor seems insanely simple until you realize that computers really don't like "inserting" data into existing data in memory, and then you're staring down the barrel of continuous memcpys.

Mind the gap!

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Bu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gap_buffer

Re: “I Could Rewrite Curl”

#67

Post by Piskvorrr »

1_player wrote: post #19
Hippocrates wrote: post #10

Just a little tangent but I think everyone should know cURL… not postman, not httpie or any other more “friendly” tool. cURL is the standard, pre-installed, do-everything, scriptable tool to interact with web APIs. I could say mostly the same stuff about knowing Bash. It separates the barely effective from hyper-effective individuals on simple day to day (programming) tasks.

I really wish busybox would bundle curl instead of wget. In the age of containers, I often find myself having to use wget when operating inside of one with busybox as shell, and I get it wrong on first try. What usually trips me up is the syntax: `curl -O http://host/file ` (goes to stdout without -O) instead of `wget http://host/file ` (goes to file without -O)

It doesn't even bundle a proper wget, just a massively stripped down HTTP client it aliases to wget. Sure, providing minimal tools is the point of busybox, but having to sniff what actually runs when you do `wget` is massively annoying. (e.g. until recently, busybox wget didn't believe in HTTPS by default)

Re: “I Could Rewrite Curl”

#68

Post by krick »

parhamn wrote: post #30

Let's be honest here. Curl to 98% of people is http/1 requests with some post params and maybe json body, with some custom headers. Most language standard libs (which might be using libcurl) can facilitate writing that relatively quickly. And probably with a more 'modern' CLI. Curl though, is a very wide breadth project. It currently supports the following protocols: DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP,…

True. I'm kind of surprised (again) by Daniel after 20 years of maintaining curl being so salty about "people not appreciating the achievement". Yes, for overwhelming majority of users curl in 2021 is just a simple http/https request client. And, yes, in 2021 that could be written over a weekend with a better CLI, mainly because most of the languages already have all important stuff implemented in a [standard] library (ironically, sometimes via libcurl).

Re: “I Could Rewrite Curl”

#69

Post by agumonkey »

I find that strange how people can be so critical about a simple utility that doesn't pose a revolutionary or boasting project ..

Apologies for all the ego driven comments, people we should relax and keep doing fun and useful stuff.

Post reply on HN