Unlike in Java, Perl, Python and all those higher level languages,
in C when you want to do something like retrieve a web page, there is
a lot more to do. There aren't stdurl or stdweb
libraries around that you can assume are always available. Since
Raptor
is a parser for an XML language,
libxml is one likely thing that is
usable and it has a tiny HTTP implementation, sufficient for GET.
There is the defacto portable web library
libcURL and so I make that also
configurable plus the W3C libwww
which is common but rather large. So problem solved.
Or so I thought. It turns out that all those APIs except for the
W3C libwww are push - they take the thread of control from
the caller and return data to it via callbacks. However I wanted the
more I/O stream-like pull i.e. the user application does
while(...) { get stuff; do stuff }. You can wrap a push API
around a pull one quite easily and efficiently, but not the other way
around - you need to store all the pushed content then deliver it
pull-by-pull. So, I'm going to have to live with that - provide both
and warn users that the pull interface will suck up memory.