libcurl
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 4 of 11 HTTP client libraries by recommenders
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.
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.
12 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 10
- criticize it
- 2
- approval share
- 83%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 10 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Battle-tested and well maintained
“an excellent, feature rich, high performance, and battle tested http client”
Comment from 17 Jun 2026 in “TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP” “which are also well maintained”
Comment from 13 Oct 2026 in “A Modern Web App in C” “their code is battle tested”
Comment from 28 Sep 2026 in “Coding is not solved” Widely used as a hidden dependency
“You may never have dug that deep into their respective documentation, and you may never have even heard of libcurl”
Comment from 5 Oct 2026 in “Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel” “quality dependencies on the level of SDL, ffmpeg, libcurl, where one domain is solved well”
Comment from 20 Aug 2026 in “Bun 1.4” “a point dependency upgrade of e.g. libcurl or whatnot”
Comment from 26 Jan 2026 in “The Holy Grail of Linux Binary Compatibility: Musl and Dlopen”
Other HTTP client libraries people recommend
The four most recommended other HTTP client libraries, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Requests (Python library) | 23 | 7 | 77% | 8 | — | Approved |
| Axios | 21 | 37 | 36% | 5 | — | — |
| Go net/http | 12 | 7 | 63% | 4 | — | — |
| libcurlThis page | 10 | 2 | 83% | 7 | — | Approved |
| httpx | 10 | 22 | 31% | 4 | — | — |
What people said
11 of the 13 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“clients are harder though, so I would keep using libcurl”
“which are also well maintained”
“You may never have dug that deep into their respective documentation, and you may never have even heard of libcurl”
“their code is battle tested”
“quality dependencies on the level of SDL, ffmpeg, libcurl, where one domain is solved well”
“an excellent, feature rich, high performance, and battle tested http client”
“it's quite trivial to use the Janet C API to wrap libcurl”
“There's so many C libraries like this”
“a point dependency upgrade of e.g. libcurl or whatnot”
“1.6% degradation in 5 years is probably better than 99% of actively developed software products”
“The increase in the number of allocations is actually a bad sign for performance”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.