25 Years of curl

[Posted March 20, 2023 by corbet]

Daniel Stenberg observes the 25th anniversary of the curl project.

We really have no idea exactly how many users or installations of libcurl there are now. It is easy to estimate that it runs in way more than ten billion installations purely based on the fact that there are 7 billion smart phones and 1 billion tablets in the world , and we know that each of them run at least one, but likely many more curl installs.

Curl 8.0.0 has also been released (quickly followed by 8.0.1).

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25 Years of curl

Posted Mar 20, 2023 14:52 UTC (Mon) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link]

Pretty amazing. Thank you, curl devs and supporters, for so much curl! :)

25 Years of curl

Posted Mar 20, 2023 14:53 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

Nice article. I haven't used libcurl explicitly, and when I want to get something on commandline I use wget because finger memory. Also, I was today years old when I realized that "curl" gets its name from its last three letters.

Good luck to the project going forward and maybe I'll switch.

25 Years of curl

Posted Mar 21, 2023 18:05 UTC (Tue) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link]

I learned of curl (the tool) when I was doing vector calculus and classical field theory in university, so I thought curl would be some play on curl (the operator). Only later I learned it meant "cat URL". Doh!

That being said, curl along with other small tools like sqlite that do one thing really really well make the world go 'round.

25 Years of curl

Posted Mar 20, 2023 17:09 UTC (Mon) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link]

Hey, they're having a party, too! :) https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/03/10/curl-25-years-onli...

25 Years of curl

Posted Mar 20, 2023 20:32 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

I remember the first time I have heard or curl in 1998.
There was this FTP directory where newly released source tarball where uploaded, and that day it was listing curl.
I remember I wondered 'why not wget' ? I never expected curl to become so important.
So congratulations and hapyy birthday!

25 Years of curl

Posted Mar 21, 2023 20:42 UTC (Tue) by himi (subscriber, #340) [Link]

I think for me the winningest thing from that long (long) history was the fact they can say in their usage summary "2 planets" - they've already conquered one planet, and found that's not enough . . .

Though quite a few bits of free software can say the same thanks to NASA and Ingenuity - it's one of the most awesome things on /any/ world.