[smaudet]

Call it Unixy or something - unix philosophy of having each program do something separate.

Makes more sense, that's what this guy does anyways with the js engine?

> Surprisingly few browsers do this--Lynx, Links, and w3m all have their own networking code

I think people are suspicious of curl because it is a common utility, and they think it can't possibly have got it right - plus there's something mildly fun about figuring out how to monitor a socket and send/receive IP packets for the first time.

I have played around a bit with the Curl code a bit, in part I also suspect other programs do it to get "closer" i.e. being able to manage/dispatch events from a thread directly instead of some signal from a curl thread, probably something about security and thread safety too...

[shiomiru]

The main reason for the aforementioned browsers not using libcurl is mostly historical, as it simply didn't exist back when they were created. (The newest of them is links, first released in 1999 - and according to the curl website, the first libcurl release with a proper interface was in 2000.)

w3m even uses its own regex engine for search, because there was no free regex engine with Japanese support the author could've used back then.