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Comment by tuyguntn | Hacker News Reader

I can write cURL in 1 line of bash:

    alias mycurl='curl'

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I think there's more truth to this comment than your presentation suggests.

I bet at least a subset of people who think they could reimplement curl easily, think of curl as a CLI tool to make HTTP requests. It's just a little bit of python/requests or node/fetch code to cover some basics for that. I think these people simply aren't aware that their programming language's built-in libraries often call in to libcurl for the dirty work.

exactly, my point was, some people think they can build it in a day, because they see their favorite library already supports sending HTTP, they might not be aware that some of those libraries are wrappers around cURL library

Seen this comment a lot in the thread, I'd like to know which libraries do. Google didn't help (as usual nowadays).

http://pycurl.io/

PycURL is a Python interface to libcurl.

I was hoping to see less obvious examples, and especially standard libraries

PHP uses libcurl for http requests.

In 99.99% of cases it is a CLI tool to make HTTP requests.

The people saying they could rewrite it are really saying "I could rewrite Curl (using an an existing HTTP library) so that 99.99% of the use cases work" which is probably true.

most people underestimate huge effort under simple to use products but integrated to our lives heavily.

* redis - I can do it, listen socket, serve from hashmap

* uber - how come this app is so huge, I can make it in 2 weekends (google map + api + database)

* cURL - easy, use my fancy library (it already implements HTTP stack) and rewrite it

....

What's interesting is that the next Uber may be created by somebody naive about the effort it will take. Being naive can be an advantage in this case. Sometimes people who KNOW the effort are discouraged and never try. And it's the guy who is clueless who ends up embarking on the quest.

Pff. I can write cURL _in Python_ in 1 line.

    import pycurl

You're available to fix exploits, right?

of course no, I just write everything in one line and forget

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