March 20th, 2018, Daniel Stenberg notes twenty years of his flexible, multi-protocol, text-based utility, curl. It is a very common client-side file transfer utility. The associated development libraries, libcurl are a couple of years younger.
curl itself and components from libcurl are found nearly everywhere these days. Due to such widespread use, it is hard to be precise with usage numbers, but conservative estimates suggest billions of people every day are using it, though mostly under the hood several layers down inside devices they own. It is the Internet transfer utility of choice for thousands of software applications. It is found in cars, television sets, routers, printers, audio equipment, mobile phones, tablets, settop boxes, and media players for starters.
A detailed, free-of-charge, ebook, Everything curl, covers basically everything there is to know about curl, libcurl, and the associated project.
Earlier on SN:
(Score: 2) by cocaine overdose on Wednesday March 21 2018, @10:28PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 22 2018, @03:23AM (1 child)
I don't know if it is still true, but libcurl's ABI/API are constantly changing, leading to breakage in any binary apps you have that use them if your operating system isn't smart enough to keep old copies of the libraries around.
Furthermore there have been a LOT of CVEs on libcurl over the years and as a result binary applications can end up negligently insecure as a result of the inability to update the library for security fixes without having to recompile many apps linking to libcurl.
But that is just my 2 cents as a 20 year vetern of linux, wget, curl and company.
(Score: 2) by cocaine overdose on Thursday March 22 2018, @03:29AM