Re: Sv: Emacs HTTP libraries [was: Re: How to contribute new package to GNU ELPA?]

[Daniel Martín]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

>
> Thanks for the answer. No idea if there is a consideration to include
> new library or not, I got impression from some other discussions on this
> list, it is rather not.

I also think that having a better networking library could be a great
addition to Emacs.  But before we decide on introducing a curl or wget
dependency, I think we should do some analysis on url.el, to be sure
about the trade-offs of the proposed new approach to do networking,
compared to what we already have.  There's two main points that people
wanted to improve in url.el, according to the comments in this thread:

- url.el has strange/buggy behavior in some scenarios.  For example,
  callbacks are run multiple times, or not at all.  This blog post[1]
  presents some of those problems, but it doesn't offer much details
  about why they happen.  The blog post is from 2016, so things might
  have changed since then.

- url.el is slow compared to using curl as an inferior process.  Again,
  the blog post cites some possible culprits, which I don't know if they
  still apply to Emacs 28, so I think we should profile url.el to
  identify its bottlenecks more precisely.

Once we have concrete numbers that we can compare against a prototype
implementation using libwget2 or libcurl, I think it'd be easier to
justify adding a new dependency to Emacs, or search for other solutions.

[1]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2016/06/16/