Should I use curl-crystal or net/http ?

[waghanza]

Hi,

I want to open a debate (no troll plz) to answer a simple question

• should I use curl-crystal or built-in net/http ?

I want to focus on security / performance, no matter who coding is difficult.

Regards,

PS : @blocknotes sorry if it's not the right place to ask this

[kostya]

curl-crystal is not concurrent, it blocks crystal main thread, so it hard to run multiple requests at the same time (or even use it with http server or something). Surely builtin lib is much better, because allowed big concurrency (but it quite limited, no proxy, no socks, no redirects, no sessions, no some more features that curl have). For concurrency with curl-crystal i use: https://github.com/kostya/curl-downloader#example-with-thread_pool-to-execute-request-in-the-background-and-not-to-lock-crystal-main-thread, but it quite hack, and have problems with segfaults.

[waghanza]

to summarize, curl-crystal is performant and recommanded if, and only if you do not need concurrency.

to be factual, I want to create a CLI to (so no need of concurrency), so curl-crystal is well chosen, in this use case, right ?

[kostya]

if you have only one request per time and no background things, so this lib if fine. i create simple wrapper for this lib: https://github.com/kostya/curl-downloader

[waghanza]

@kostya ok. seems nice ;-) I will try

[blocknotes]

Hi @waghanza
Your question is right; basically I agree with @kostya

In most cases it's better to use the standard library built-in net functions.
This shard could be useful in some situations where some specific net options are needed or as alternative for testing purposes.