On Tuesday, 26 November 2013 at 23:05:08 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
That's quite a claim to make.
If you've used HTTP, you'll know how true it is. Indeed, since a
request consists solely of a request and a body, being able to
change them by definition gives you full access!
The most complex things in http are proxying and caching. curl
does proxying, wich my 300 line http.d doesn't do. As far as I
know, curl doesn't do caching at all. (My curl.d offers a cache
functionality on top of curl, but it ignores the http headers,
instead opting simply for a max age provided by the programmer,
e.g. "refresh cache if the file is more than four hours old or
doesn't exist, otherwise just return the cache file's contents".)
but from what I see at http://curl.haxx.se/changes.html it
seems to me like a hard working professional is responding to
real bug reports and feature requests from the field
Yet, very little of that stuff is actually exposed through
std.net.curl anyway, except perhaps through the download() and
upload() functions. Phobos doesn't directly expose tftp, imap,
pop, globbing, ntlm, nor most of the other things mentioned on
that changelog.
SSL is legitimately a bit of a pain, but curl doesn't actually
implement ssl, it just uses it, with a few different backends -
openssl, gnutls, and so forth. Indeed, this is one of the
difficulties in using curl with D, it is compiled with openssl
but the client machine uses gnutls or whatever. We'd have that
same problem.
Async requests are similar to ssl: it should implemented in a
generic way for all I/O, then the http layer can just use that.
It's probably just a matter of time before there's demand for an
async file and socket facility in there anyway.
Again though, my position is that curl is ok and I use it myself,
but let's not assume we need the entire kitchen sink that curl
offers, especially given the fact that std.net.curl barely
scratches it anyway. If someone does need one of curl's less
common features, it is still there for them, but for the 99% we
can do with the std.net.curl api, I'm sure we could make that
happen in ~1000 lines of curl replacement.
