The problem is not to make a tool like curl.
The problem is the marketing and getting people to use it.
You can easily make the best product and still not being able to get the word out there.
The problem is the marketing and getting people to use it.
You can easily make the best product and still not being able to get the word out there.
I couldn't say when curl was released without looking it up, but I know it's been around for at least a couple of decades. There were not many command-line tools for dealing with web stuff, and curl got picked up by most Linux distributions, the BSDs, and various embedded things because it was the only tool that did what it did, as well as it did. And then it became famous essentially for being ubiquitous, like bash or vim.
"Marketing" seems to have had very little (if anything at all) to do with it.
Because the library gets ported to every new platform anyways (it's what people use so will be the first to be ported to a new architecture or whatever) so the cli gets support for everything new "for free" so can outcompete wget (because it's always _there_ and works the same).
Now, there's also the fact that the curl cli is a fantastic piece of software, but in terms of features I don't think there's that much between curl and wget for simple cli usecases (but I still use curl).
Though wget isn't perfect for mirroring, as it will typically download large amounts of resources redundantly only differing in URL query params when those refer to the same content, such as on typical WeirdPress sites with comment links. Ideal would be an HTTP client with http/3, auth token, and keepalive support etc. based on libcurl that can be customized, such as via "href handlers" triggered by event-driven markup parsers for SGML (though CSS and JS imports need special treatment).
What other common cases take flags on curl but not wget?
But curl was something new when it came out, and it truly filled a void both as a cli tool and as a library. It needed no marketing. We needed it.
It's hard now to imagine a world without a tool like curl, but quite a few of us are old enough to remember it still.
Overcoming the initial "why should I even look at this" to me is the hardest part