On cURL's 23rd Anniversary, Creator Daniel Stenberg Celebrated With 3D-Printed 'GitHub Steel' Contribution Graph (daniel.haxx.se) 25
This week Swedish developer Daniel Stenberg posted a remarkable reflection on the 23rd anniversary of his command-line data tool, cURL:
curl was adopted in Red Hat Linux in late 1998, became a Debian package in May 1999, shipped in Mac OS X 10.1 in August 2001. Today, it is also shipped by default in Windows 10 and in iOS and Android devices. Not to mention the game consoles, Nintendo Switch, Xbox and Sony PS5.
Amusingly, libcurl is used by the two major mobile OSes but not provided as an API by them, so lots of apps, including many extremely large volume apps bundle their own libcurl build: YouTube, Skype, Instagram, Spotify, Google Photos, Netflix etc. Meaning that most smartphone users today have many separate curl installations in their phones.
Further, libcurl is used by some of the most played computer games of all times: GTA V, Fortnite, PUBG mobile, Red Dead Redemption 2 etc.
libcurl powers media players and set-top boxes such as Roku, Apple TV by maybe half a billion TVs.
curl and libcurl ships in virtually every Internet server and is the default transfer engine in PHP, which is found in almost 80% of the world's almost two billion websites.
Cars are Internet-connected now. libcurl is used in virtually every modern car these days to transfer data to and from the vehicles.
Then add media players, kitchen and medical devices, printers, smart watches and lots of "smart"; IoT things. Practically speaking, just about every Internet-connected device in existence runs curl.
I'm convinced I'm not exaggerating when I claim that curl exists in over ten billion installations world-wide...
Those 300 lines of code in late 1996 have grown to 172,000 lines in March 2021.
Stenberg attributes cURL's success to persistence. "We hold out. We endure and keep polishing. We're here for the long run. It took me two years (counting from the precursors) to reach 300 downloads. It took another ten or so until it was really widely available and used." But he adds that 22 different CPU architectures and 86 different operating systems are now known to have run curl.
In a later blog post titled "GitHub Steel," Stenberg also reveals that GitHub gave him a 3D-printed steel version of his 2020 GitHub contribution matrix — accompanied by a friendly note. "Please accept this small gift as a token of appreciation on behalf of all of us here at GitHub, and everyone who benefits from your work."
Amusingly, libcurl is used by the two major mobile OSes but not provided as an API by them, so lots of apps, including many extremely large volume apps bundle their own libcurl build: YouTube, Skype, Instagram, Spotify, Google Photos, Netflix etc. Meaning that most smartphone users today have many separate curl installations in their phones.
Further, libcurl is used by some of the most played computer games of all times: GTA V, Fortnite, PUBG mobile, Red Dead Redemption 2 etc.
libcurl powers media players and set-top boxes such as Roku, Apple TV by maybe half a billion TVs.
curl and libcurl ships in virtually every Internet server and is the default transfer engine in PHP, which is found in almost 80% of the world's almost two billion websites.
Cars are Internet-connected now. libcurl is used in virtually every modern car these days to transfer data to and from the vehicles.
Then add media players, kitchen and medical devices, printers, smart watches and lots of "smart"; IoT things. Practically speaking, just about every Internet-connected device in existence runs curl.
I'm convinced I'm not exaggerating when I claim that curl exists in over ten billion installations world-wide...
Those 300 lines of code in late 1996 have grown to 172,000 lines in March 2021.
Stenberg attributes cURL's success to persistence. "We hold out. We endure and keep polishing. We're here for the long run. It took me two years (counting from the precursors) to reach 300 downloads. It took another ten or so until it was really widely available and used." But he adds that 22 different CPU architectures and 86 different operating systems are now known to have run curl.
In a later blog post titled "GitHub Steel," Stenberg also reveals that GitHub gave him a 3D-printed steel version of his 2020 GitHub contribution matrix — accompanied by a friendly note. "Please accept this small gift as a token of appreciation on behalf of all of us here at GitHub, and everyone who benefits from your work."
Basic math, anyone? (Score:1)
1998 (Red Hat) is more than 20 years ago. I'm assuming the 1996 date is the actual date, which means this is the 25th anniversary.
Sheesh, I know this is Slashdot, but I'd expect the so-called editors to be able to do basic arithmetic.
Re:Basic math, anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
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You contradict yourself. You have a low UID, you *know* this is slashdot, and you still *expect* the editors to do math?
To put it into contemporary context: You expect, without evidence, that the so-called editors should be able to do basic arithmetic.
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Another low UID'er here, and yea, there used to be a time when the editors *did* care, and do things like the math. CmdrTaco had no problem doing it, and even sometimes did the math wrong. But in the last twelve years (or so) of this site's existence, ..., well I say no more.
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No, I didn't RTFA. I admit it.
However, TFS, refers to 300 lines of code from 1996, refers to cURL being included in Red Hat in 1998.
20 years ago was 2001.
Calm down (Score:2)
curl and libcurl ships in virtually every Internet server ...
So is, say, "ls". (Just sayin'...)
What about Wget? (Score:2)
Wget was released in January of 1996 which makes it 25 years old. Honestly, I find it easier to use and more concise as opposed to curl's seemingly infinite options.
Just sayin'
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Here's a great guide to both (Score:1)
Wget was released in January of 1996 which makes it 25 years old. Honestly, I find it easier to use and more concise as opposed to curl's seemingly infinite options.
Exactly the same age, both have evolved somewhat differently...
Personally I mostly use Curl, but I found a comparison between wget and curl [daniel.haxx.se] and there are some pretty nice things that wget does like recursive fetch... so I'll probably make use of wget a bit in the future as well.
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Have you ever dealt with Ansible? The error messages are JSON with the messages escaped inside the JSON. Which is really not useful on a command line.
Oh, and since they are in JSON you would think that at least there would be meta-information in there about which line+ of a template gave an error? You would be wrong.
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I like wget more than curl too. aria2c is nice too.
Where's my plaque? (Score:2)
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Did you also include a shell wrapper so it can be used from the command line?
wget then curl (Score:5, Interesting)
I used wget for many years simply because I was working on other GNU projects and wget was under the GNU umbrella, and thus available on every GNU system, making my scripts fully portable. It was a surprise when I finally started using curl and saw how much more "UINXy" it was than wget.
TIL that wget and curl were released on the same day! I had somehow thought wget was significantly older, but that's just my early experience getting in the way.
I still use wget for one-liners only because my fingers happen to remember it best. But if there's a second line or a pipe, it's curl all the way.
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not all geeks use linux you fucking nerd
Yes they do. If you were a geek you would know that.
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What is cURL and why is it all over API docs? (Score:1)
I bet libc shares the same popularity (Score:2)
And maybe more!