Daniel Stenberg reflects on 30 years of curl and libcurl development

In a retrospective piece, curl creator Daniel Stenberg marks the 30th anniversary of the curl project. The article highlights the massive scale of the project, noting that libcurl is estimated to be present in approximately thirty billion installations worldwide.

Despite the astronomical number of users, Stenberg notes that the core development challenges and community interactions remain consistent regardless of the installation count. The project continues to rely on manual verification through credit screens and licenses to track its vast and shifting footprint across the software landscape.

Scale and development of the curl project

• Deployment Scale: libcurl is estimated to run in roughly 30 billion installations, though exact numbers fluctuate as applications adopt or deprecate the library.
• Usage Tracking: Project developers track adoption primarily through manual audits of open source license windows, credit screens, and software manuals.
• Development Philosophy: The project maintains a consistent approach to technical challenges and community engagement despite the massive scale of its user base.
• Library Versatility: The project encompasses both the curl command-line tool and the libcurl library used by a wide variety of software ecosystems.

Why it matters

As a fundamental building block for network transfers, curl and libcurl underpin much of the modern internet's connectivity. Its stability and ubiquity make it a critical dependency for Linux distributions, embedded systems, and cloud-native applications alike.