Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

It'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...

I'm a business consultant and surprised how Daniel missed a big opportunity here. He should start selling to big enterprises by making curl a subscription-based model. Then he could hire thousands of developers to support him so he never has to do the grunt work himself and completely focus on monetization strategy and a rewrite in nextjs. Then he could start an ad-based model in partnership with Facebook for free use to support the free tier. Daniel, if you're reading this contact me. We can make a good deal.

I am hoping this is tongue in cheek, but also a little scared it might be in earnest... on the plus side trying to imagine what ad-supported curl calls might look like does at least make me giggle a little.

If people think this is a joke, get real.

Just think of it:

HTTP is in the base, but HTTPS is on a subscription model with payment based on volume, cipher, and number of hosts communicated with. Hosts can pay to make their endpoints cheaper to talk to, but curl adds sponsored fields to all JSON sent to endpoints unless a "clean JSON" subscription is purchased. curl of course sends telemetry to its developers' endpoint, at the usual rate, and refuses to work if that endpoint sends a 5xx or 4xx response. Better hope Cloudflare doesn't have one of its hiccups while you're debugging a RESTful endpoint!

(Telemetry may be used to ensure curl isn't employed in violating the law, trade secrets, business model, or terms of service of any business partners. All of this is strictly necessary because the curl developers have no legal or financial presence in the EU or California. Your continued use of curl constitutes your assent to these practices.)

Postman somehow is a business and I am perplexed every day.

Would love to hear the explanation for that. When people use postman I'm wondering, why not use curl itself? Never looked into postman and know well enough even in C, a simple GET (or POST!) request is a few lines of code.

It’s a convenient way to store and sort lots of curl requests for later use, its best cases are when you’ve got libraries of APIs you interact with semi-regularly (but not in such a consistent way that you’d be better off just writing a script). The paid version exists primarily so that you can have such a collection synced between an entire team automatically…but I’ve never worked somewhere that would be worth the cost.

For one off requests, yeah there’s no point to something like that.

Its user interface is kinda meh but it's pretty good for documenting and demoing an API across a developer team. However, Postman owns the data and upsells you a cloud solution.

A set of curl scripts or a .http file (httpie) held in your project's git repository is IMO preferable, most editors allow you to run these directly from the editor.

Because GUIs are a thing that a lot of people find useful

A thing for people who don't know HTTP and url encoding basics? Would help if you explained what the 'thing' is.

It's great for introducing people to HTTP, I always refer inexperienced new-hires to use it since it has proven to very effective at getting them up to speed. In many ways you could say Postman offers a GUI to the protocol itself, making it something you can visually explore.

I see stuff like curl as a more advanced tool for people who already know what they are doing. In fact Postman even offers a curl "export" option that lets you see how to do whatever you have done in Postman, using curl instead. So arguably, it's also a good introduction to curl as well.

It's useful for documenting and testing large sets of APIs in a team-based environment, especially those that use a variety of authentication options.

Testing and scripting between requests and being able to share collections with colleagues.

You could also try Hurl [1] which is a cli tool using plain text and libcurl for run and test HTTP requests. I'm one of the maintainer and very grateful to curl/libcurl! My project couldn't exist without it.

[1] https://hurl.dev

The simple way to do this is just to declare that a new curl is needed in Rust, and you'll get thousands of people lined up to work on your "breakthrough" project. Then get seed funding for this incredible task and you'll have a business!

If people think this is a joke, get real.

> How big would the patreon be? The Github sponsors?

I don't get it. Those are ethical ways to reward people for their valuable work. Are you implying people should be ashamed of this?

They do have a few sponsors: https://curl.se/sponsors.html

Then presumably he’s criticizing Curl as it exists today.

So true! All of this makes me feel like I missed out on the golden era of open source. I mean I was there 25 years ago but my programming skills were not good enough to write something like ls command, let alone something like curl!

If I knew as much about programming 25 years ago as I know now, maybe I may have thought of writing something like curl or wget too and make a successful project out of it. But alas! Those days are gone. And developing a new project these days comes with so much baggage. Developing something like curl from scratch today would be a mammoth task. The HTTP/HTTPS protocol spec has become huge! And so many compatibility issues to consider and resolve even for creating an MVP that can get some minimal adoption.

What good problems are there today that curious developers like me can work on? Problems that do not have a huge historical baggage and compatibility issues to worry about? Problems that are still new and tractable enough for a single person to work on and get an MVP out?

You could tackle curl as a service. I don't think anyone has done that one yet, Yahoo pipes got close, but we don't talk about Yahoo without losing all credibility.

I'll take 10% and I'll see you at the IPO!

It doesn't have to be anything new; you could contribute to the SDKs of some of the current-day new programming languages like Rust and Go, that will have reimplementations of what curl does as well.

Nothing I can think of that will make you important though.

I think it's less curl and more the author's personality, at least in this case.

Curl seems to pop up here amazingly often. I don't think wget for instance has the same prominence, or gpg, or many other tools.

This made me laugh and cry…

What was the most depressing funny post I’ve seen. Ever. Great job. I genuinely feel sad and nostalgic now. I know there’s a lot of love for Discord but oh boy, where do I start…

You omitted the GPT and web3 (possibly passé) angles…

Apologies, my data set for training is circa 2021.

Well at least there would be a rust version coming very soon now.

Don't forget the blockchain integration

Reply on news.ycombinator.com