Noob question: what's the purpose of having so many request libraries? In JavaScript it's crazy, but in Python it's starting to feel the same: requests, httpx, httpx2...<p>From my perspective, HTTP requests have been mastered for years (decades?). What's the point of switching libraries? What's so extraordinary about the <i>new</i> HTTP library that makes requests look crap?<p>I understand that new protocols appear from time to time (like HTTP/2), but that's very rare. And if there are performance differences between two libraries, are they really that huge? Even if they are, 99% of people don't need that boost. What prevents someone from just improving the existing library's performance?
`requests` has a friendlier API than the standard library. However, it does not support newer versions of HTTP, nor does it support `async`. The maintainer considers it complete, feature-frozen software, IIRC - they'd rather keep it stable for existing users and let other libraries succeed it.<p>`aiohttp` supports `async` but was never popular for non-async<p>`httpx` supported newer HTTP versions and both async and non-async. However the maintainer decided to close all outside submissions, issues and discussions for personal reasons.<p>`httpx2` is a maintained fork of `httpx`
HTTP is a pretty complex space once you get into the nitty-gritty of use-cases, common request handling patterns & conditional/dynamic header-definitions. In general this leads to:<p>- (a) built-ins (& some libraries) being very verbose to use because they tend to take a "fundamentals of HTTP" approach & not implement shortcuts/common patterns<p>- (b) libraries commonly falling into the trap of going the opposite direction & ending up with massive scope-creep and/or oversimplified, un-expressive APIs.<p>This leads to a churn of libraries due to developers yearning for a Goldilocks implementation in between.<p>Javascript tends to be ahead of other ecosystems in churn due to ease of library publishing, Python's catching up, but overall it's the same pattern in both.<p>---<p>Also, one big additional factor is async:<p>- NodeJS built-ins implemented a callback pattern just before promises took off, & have struggled to upgrade to promises cleanly without breaking backward compat.<p>- Python's got a similar story with various generations of http library being sync, or relying on different async approaches in confusing ways.
There can be different APIs or different technical implementations with certain performance characteristics. In this case, there isn't any purpose, though. It's just that development has slowed or stopped on the previous libraries and forking/renaming is easier than trying to continue the previous projects, for various reasons.