I can't help but think that curl is, by nature, a relatively simple and well-contained tool. Compare to an operating system or web browser or database or billion dollar company codebase.
It makes some sense that Mythos/ChatGPT 5.5 might be that much better with complexities that curl just doesn't have because it's a basic tool.
Like yeah curl is obviously extremely fully featured as an "anything client" but it's orders of magnitude less complex than other software we rely on.
Curl is a lot more complicated than, I believe, you think. Most people know of it simply as a CLI to hit an HTTP(S) endpoint and write it out. But:
1. It supports basically any file transfer protocol.
2. It is a library that is designed for long running processes.
3. Because it's designed for long running processes, it makes use of every trick it can to pipeline and re-use connections and resources.
4. It has an asynchronous API so it can be integrated into any existing event loop.
Is a web browser or database more complicated? Most certainly, they solve really massive problems. But curl is certainly more complicated than probably most application code that uses it.
I agree it's rather basic but as stated in the article, its code is still longer than war and peace. There is still plenty of opportunities for security vulnerabilities in something of that size.
"curl is currently 176,000 lines of C code when we exclude blank lines. The source code consists of 660,000 words, which is 12% more words than the entire English edition of the novel War and Peace.
...
curl is installed in over twenty billion instances. It runs on over 110 operating systems and 28 CPU architectures. It runs in every smart phone, tablet, car, TV, game console and server on earth."
curl is dealing with the complexity of HTTP.
Even doing a simple basic request to some website, is going to cover a lot of code paths to deal with all sorts of response codes (redirects, etc.), headers, etc.
It's likely that new Rust code would introduce more bugs, while curl is extremely well tested at this point.
It makes some sense that Mythos/ChatGPT 5.5 might be that much better with complexities that curl just doesn't have because it's a basic tool.
Like yeah curl is obviously extremely fully featured as an "anything client" but it's orders of magnitude less complex than other software we rely on.