3 posts tagged “daniel-stenberg”
2025
Writing C for curl
(via)
Daniel Stenberg maintains curl - a library that deals with the most hostile of environments, parsing content from the open internet - as 180,000 lines of C89 code.
He enforces a strict 80 character line width for readability, zero compiler warnings, avoids "bad" functions like gets, sprintf, strcat, strtok and localtime (CI fails if it spots them, I found that script here) and curl has their own custom dynamic buffer and parsing functions.
They take particular care around error handling:
In curl we always check for errors and we bail out without leaking any memory if (when!) they happen.
I like their commitment to API/ABI robustness:
Every function and interface that is publicly accessible must never be changed in a way that risks breaking the API or ABI. For this reason and to make it easy to spot the functions that need this extra precautions, we have a strict rule: public functions are prefixed with “curl_” and no other functions use that prefix.
2023
trurl manipulates URLs.
Brand new command-line tool from curl creator Daniel Stenberg: The tr stands for translate or transpose, and the tool provides various mechanisms for normalizing URLs, adding query strings, changing the path or hostname and other similar modifications. I’ve tried designing APis for this kind of thing in the past—Datasette includes some clumsily named functions such as path_with_removed_args()—and it’s a deceptively deep set of problems.
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2021
Making world-class docs takes effort (via) Curl maintainer Daniel Stenberg writes about his principles for good documentation. I agree with all of these: he emphasizes keeping docs in the repo, avoiding the temptation to exclusively generate them from code, featuring examples and ensuring every API you provide has documentation. Daniel describes an approach similar to the documentation unit tests I’ve been using for my own projects: he has scripts which scan the curl documentation to ensure not only that everything is documented but that each documentation area contains the same sections in the same order.