Daniel’s a true legend in the community. If only we all could make something even 1% as useful as curl, the world would be a better place!
Thanks Daniel!
Edit: my comment is not intended to disparage the rest of us. Clearly there is an element of luck to making something tremendously useful. That being said, Daniel is an amazing steward of a useful tool. Sometimes the job can seem pretty thankless for him (cough Apple) so I wanted to thank him!
> I have thought about a HDMI/keyboard switch to allow me more easily switch between my different spare computers into the left “backup screen” to make it a lesser hassle to alter between those machines, but I haven’t yet decided nor found a product that would be suitable.
Personally I love the Level 1 KVMs but they only do DisplayPort now.
I work from home and every day I switch my cables to my work computer which takes 10 seconds. I don't want to pay $300 to shave 20 seconds off of my day.
Pretty chaotic for my taste! I find that having clutter on my desktop distracts me and makes me feel uneasy. I'm wondering what the difference between Daniel and me is. Could it just be a personality trait?
I too like a clean desk. But a clean desk doesn't stay that for long. So all clean desk lovers like me tend to have a cluttered desk.
The clean desks you see in pictures are obviously staged, or maybe people are really able to do serious work without ever putting a pen, or a cable, or a phone, or a mug on, sooner or later.
It's like doing the dishes. One of the things I hate the most in life, because you clean stuff so you can dirty it later. A clean desk is one that nobody uses, while your favourite cup is always in the washer.
Right, it's a constant process of getting messy and cleaning it up again. Speaking of which, brb ... cleaning my desk now haha. But the main difference is: I have my keyboard, mouse, closed macbook, a plant, and a big curved ultra-wide monitor on my desk. The rest is temporary clutter. Daniels desk however is full of "full-time tenants". I guess that's the difference.
How is my job my personality? Lol ... I do code a lot in my free time, started coding at 14 years old and I contribute to open source as well. Pretty closed minded thinking to be honest.
I immediately recognised the Cambridge Audio subwoofer under the desk. I had the same set on my PC from about 1998-1999 along with an Aureal Vortex. I loved that setup.
IKEA was originally a Swedish company and still does their design in Sweden, so perhaps it’s not surprising that a homemade Swedish desk looks a lot like an IKEA desk.
IKEA doesn't have a 3 meter desk last time I checked. I'm guessing he bought a 3 meter wood counter top and screwed IKEA desk legs to it. That's what I did at least.
Most who make a living out of it work on the project as part of their jobs at larger tech companies or universities. A few manage to start a company around that project and make a living selling various licenses and support. A tiny number manage to (at least temporarily) scrape together a living from donations.
For a large number of them however being an open source maintainer is an unpaid hobby they do on their evenings and weekends.
It isn't a solved problem because standards are evolving. The most noticeable ones are related to encryption, but there are also HTTP2, WebSockets, QUIC and other protocols you need to speak on the web.
HTTP 2/3 are mostly bad ideas (slightly less bad in the case of 3, but still overkill) pushed by Google to optimize an edge case no one but web browsers care about.
I have implemented many networking applications from Ethernet to application protocols. I am also particularly aware of how HTTP and all the related stack works.
"I work for wolfSSL doing commercial curl support. If you need help to fix curl problems, fix your app's use of libcurl, add features to curl, fix curl bugs, optimize your curl use or libcurl education for your developers... Then I'm your man. Contact us!"
From his website. They wouldn't give him a full-time position if there wasn't enough to do.
I think you are all overlooking the prevalence of libcurl
While the curl CLI is ubiquitous in our world, libcurl is embedded and used all over the place. Given that it has always been well maintained and enhanced I do not see a lot of reason to create alternatives or for someone to look to replace it.
"It's just one HTTP client. There are better ones."
Why don't you stop being intentionally vague and tell us which ones, and what makes them better?
Because if there is something better than curl, with its enormous scope in protocols and platforms, and free of charge to boot, I would surely like to know.
Curl's installed base is enormous. If everyone who uses curl had to switch to some other solution tomorrow, that would mean millions of developer hours wasted. If anything, the author of curl should be paid more.
I usually use curl. wget does have one feature that curl doesn't (or at least I'm aware of), namely recursive downloading. So you can easily somewhat download an entire site.
I already explained, what's better is what fits your needs exactly.
Without knowing your requirements it would be difficult to say.
Say for example your main concern is latency, you only need support for MTU-sized payloads, you want ro guarantee that the TCP connection is always established ahead of time and your requests always follow the same pattern with a few bytes to tweak.
You can easily write something that can do those things much better than curl in a couple of hours.
Oh right, and if your need is to open a specific site only, your best choice would be to write your own browser heavily optimized just for this particular site, instead of using Chrome. Nonsense.
Thanks Daniel!
Edit: my comment is not intended to disparage the rest of us. Clearly there is an element of luck to making something tremendously useful. That being said, Daniel is an amazing steward of a useful tool. Sometimes the job can seem pretty thankless for him (cough Apple) so I wanted to thank him!