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Comment by kyberias | Hacker News Reader

> Rough estimates say we may have a billion users already.

This cannot be true by a long shot. Or am I missing something?

It all depends on how you count and what a "user" is of course, but this little list helps to give a picture: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/companies.html

The most common language used on websites is PHP which uses libcurl to handle HTTP requests.

PHP applications may use libcurl when making outbound HTTP requests, right? That is only a small subset of these web sites. Most web sites just normally process HTTP requests.

This does not seem to explain the 1 billion users figure.

WordPress uses libcurl, according to a google search there are 74,652,825 sites using WordPress. How many unique visitors do you think these sites get? I would guess over a billion.

Oh come on, you just don't get it do you?

Just because Wordpress, which is a blog platform, uses libcurl for something you didn't even state (probably some outbound http stuff), doesn't mean it uses it to process most of the incoming requests for the millions of users.

We don't say Solitare is the most successful game ever just because it's installed with every copy of Windows.

If you count a user as a system which has curl installed, and has run it at some point, is curl on iOS and Android? If so, you will be in that ball park I imagine.

I've seen it in various toasters, smart TVs and other embedded devices...so this is also a large "user" base.

That wouldn't be that surprising depending on what they mean. Assuming that Google or Facebook use curl in various applications, 1 billion sounds about right.

Depends if you're defining that as someone who has manually run a cURL command or as someone who has used an app/hardware that uses cURL "behind the scenes". If you use the latter I would say 1 billion might be a significant underestimate.

Isn't it installed on OS X by default?

I don't know but just having it installed as part of OS distribution doesn't really count as "user", now does it?

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