I'm working on a Windows-based HTTP project and am
kicking around both cURL and WinInet. So far, I'm
inclined to go with cURL for the following two
reasons:

a. The API is much more straightforward.

b. I was never able to get Asynchronous WinInet to
work, and consequently took a rather roundabout
approach to implementing timeouts: Execute various
WinInet calls [InternetConnect(), HttpOpenRequest(),
HttpSendRequest() and InternetRead()] in transient
worker threads and catch timeouts via
WaitForSingleObject(). By contrast, cURL seems to
handle timeouts mucy more cleanly, especially when one
uses c-ares for asynchronous DNS.

That said, has anyone out there done an in-depth
comparison of cURL with WinInet? Also note that
portability is a very low priority for me right now.

Thanks in advance,
Jeff Phillips
Received on 2004-08-13