HTTP/3 in curl mid 2024

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Style Pass

2024-06-10 11:30:06

I think curl’s situation is symptomatic for a lot of other HTTP tools and libraries. HTTP/3 has been and continues to be a much tougher deployment journey than HTTP/2 was.

You can enable HTTP/3 for curl using one of these four different approaches. We provide multiple different ones to let “the market” decide and to allow different solutions to “compete” with each other so that users eventually can get the best one. The one they prefer. That saves us from the hard problem of trying to pick a winner early in the race.

It already does if you build it yourself with the right set of third party libraries. Also, the curl for windows binaries provided by the curl project supports HTTP/3.

For Linux and other distributions and operating system packagers, a big challenge remains that the most widely used TLS library (OpenSSL) does not offer the widely accepted QUIC API that most other TLS libraries provide. (Remember that HTTP/3 uses QUIC which uses TLS 1.3 internally.) This lack of API prevents existing QUIC libraries to work with OpenSSL as their TLS solution forcing everyone who want to use a QUIC library to use another TLS library – because curl does not easily allows itself to get built using multiple TLS libraries . Having a separate TLS library for QUIC than for other TLS based protocols is not supported.

Debian tries an experiment to enable HTTP/3 in their shipped version of curl by switching to GnuTLS (and building with nghttp2 + nghttp3).