A lot!
One of the most common reactions or questions I get about curl when I show up at conferences somewhere and do presentations:
— is curl still being actively developed?
How many more protocols can there be? This of course being asked by people without very close proximity or insight into the curl project and probably neither into the internet protocol world – which frankly probably is most of the civilized world. Still, these questions keep surprising me. Can projects actually ever get done?
(And do people really believe that adding protocols is the only thing that is left to do?)
Everything changes
There are new car models being made every year in spite of the roads being mostly the same for the last decades and there are new browser versions shipped every few weeks even though the web to most casual observers look roughly the same now as it did a few years ago. Etc etc. Even things such as shoes or bicycles are developed and shipped in new versions every year.
In spite of how it may appear to casual distant observers, very few things remain the same over time in this world. This certainly is also true for internet, the web and how to do data transfers over them. Just five years ago we did internet transfers differently than how we (want to) do them today. New tweaks and proposals are brought up at least on a monthly basis.
Not evolving implies stagnation and eventually… death.
As standards, browsers and users update their expectations, curl does as well. curl needs to adapt and keep up to stay relevant. We want to keep improving it so that it can match and go beyond what people want from it. We want to help drive and push internet transfer technologies to help users to do better, more efficient and more secure operations. We like carrying the world’s infrastructure on our shoulders.
It might evolve for decades to come
One of the things that actually have occurred to me, after having worked on this project for some decades by now – and this is something I did not at all consider in the past, is that there is a chance that the project will remain alive and in use the next few decades as well. Because of exactly this nothing-ever-stops characteristic of the world around us, but also of course because of the existing amount of users and usage.
Current development should be done with care, a sense of responsibility and with the anticipation that we will carry everything we merge today with us for several more decades – at least. At the latest curl up meeting, I had session I called 100 year curl where I brought up thoughts for us as a project that we might need to work on and keep in mind if indeed we believe the curl project will and should be able to celebrate its 100th birthday in a future. It is a slightly overwhelming (terrifying even?) thought but in my opinion not entirely unrealistic. And when you think about it, we have already traveled almost 30% of the way towards that goalpost.
But it looks the same
— I used curl the first time decades ago and it still looks the same.
This is a common follow-up statement. What have we actually done during all this time that the users can’t spot?
A related question that to me also is a little amusing is then:
— You say you worked on curl full time since 2019, but what do you actually do all days?
We work hard at maintaining backwards compatibility and not breaking existing use cases. If you cannot spot any changes and your command lines just keep working, it confirms that we do things right. curl is meant to do its job and stay out of the way. To mostly be boring. A dull stack is a good stack.
We have refactored and rearranged the internal architecture of curl and libcurl several times in the past and we keep doing it at regular intervals as we improve and adapt to new concepts, new ideas and the ever-evolving world. But we never let that impact the API, the ABI or by breaking any previously working curl tool command lines.
I personally think that this is curl’s secret super power. The one thing we truly have accomplished and managed to stick to: stability. In several aspects of the word.
curl offers stability in an unstable world.
Now more than ever
Counting commit frequency or any other metric of project activity, the curl project is actually doing more development now and at a higher pace than ever before during its entire lifetime.
We do this to offer you and everyone else the best, the most reliable, the fastest, the most feature rich, the best documented and the most secure internet transfer library on the planet.
