# libcurl

10 Hacker News commenters recommended libcurl and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** People recommend libcurl as a feature-rich, high-performance HTTP client that is battle-tested and well maintained, and often used as a dependency without people realizing it.

## Why people recommend it

- Battle-tested and well maintained (3 comments): "an excellent, feature rich, high performance, and battle tested http client" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48573938)) "which are also well maintained" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50069598)) "their code is battle tested" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49882719))
- Widely used as a hidden dependency (3 comments): "You may never have dug that deep into their respective documentation, and you may never have even heard of libcurl" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49959356)) "quality dependencies on the level of SDL, ffmpeg, libcurl, where one domain is solved well" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49375759)) "a point dependency upgrade of e.g. libcurl or whatnot" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46765550))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Requests (Python library)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/requests.md): 23 recommend
- [Axios](https://hackerapproved.com/p/axios.md): 21 recommend
- [Go net/http](https://hackerapproved.com/p/go-net-http.md): 12 recommend
- [httpx](https://hackerapproved.com/p/httpx.md): 10 recommend
- [Niquests](https://hackerapproved.com/p/niquests.md): 8 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "libcurl", https://hackerapproved.com/p/libcurl/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).