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curl / libcurl / libsoup Comparison

Notes About libsoup compared to libcurl

These are only some quick notes. If you have additional experiencies and comments you want to share with the world, we're all ears!

Some info for this page was extracted from the libsoup page.

libcurl is (far) more portable
libsoup lacks support for: NTLM for proxies (Proxy-Authentication:), GSS and trailers in chunked responses
libsoup only builds with GnuTLS for TLS support
libsoup offers server-side support
libsoup is using GNOME-related libs, making it a less convenient choice for non-GNOME environments.
SOCKS support has been removed from libsoup

"I found that libsoup is far slower than libcurl. It uses at least 4x the amount of CPU to transfer a high-bitrate datastream over HTTP. I attribute this to the over-reliance on heavy-weight glib/gobject constructs. Man, that stuff is slow *and* a pain to use!" - [name withdrawn]