cURL gives up using pipelining technology

Recently, cURL author, Daniel Stenberg in his blog announced that “starting with this commit, to be shipped in release 7.65.0, curl no longer has any code that supports HTTP/1.1 pipelining.” In fact, as early as cURL 7.62.0, this feature was disabled in the code, so developers who keep the latest version of the app should not notice the difference.

Daniel said, “Pipelining was always offered on a best-effort basis and there was never any guarantee that requests would actually be pipelined, so we can remove this feature entirely without breaking API or ABI promises. Applications that ask libcurl to use pipelining can still do that, it just won’t have any effect.”

By default, large desktop browsers have never enabled HTTP pipelining because of many issues, such as server implementation interruptions. And for a long time, Firefox and Chrome have completely given up on support for pipeline technology. Over time, cURL’s support for pipeline technology has become more and more lonely.

So, Daniel believes that in 2019, pipe technology should be abandoned and replaced with HTTP/2.