How about libcruel - Chrome reimplementing usable external libraries

Or libcrocurl and crocurl. Lots of better options.

libchrurl

It's visually more distinct than libcrurl while retaining an appropriate resemblance to libcurl.

One could argue that some resemblance in name is a good thing for curl. But libcrurl is too close and likely to cause confusion.

libcrurl vs libcurl, I know naming things is hard but this just seems hostile against the Curl developer.

Could be worse - like when MS added curl as a powershell alias. https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/pull/1901

I really don't see what all the drama was over. Those aliases are incredibly valuable to me. I can never remember the PS equivalents of unix-y commands and those aliases let me use my current muscle memory.

Sure the options are different but it's really not all that different than switching between GNU/Linux, MacOS, and BSD and having to deal with differences.

    PS> cd C:\Users\
    PS> ls
    PS> wget https://example.com

And it makes discovery super easy when you can Get-Help just about every unix command and it will show you more-or-less the appropriate equivalent. The thread just looks like a bunch of people with a bone to pick against MS trying to take some moral high-ground with a change that was added to genuinely help users.

Windows 10 builds have included a 'real' curl for about a year now (build 1803 onwards IIRC)[1]

[1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/01/13/microsoft-curls-too/

Just to reiterate- in Windows 8/Server 2012 (PS ~3-5), writing "curl" would just alias to "Invoke-WebRequest". Prior discussion from 2016 on hn[0].

But since December 2017, Windows 10 build 1803 includes curl.exe (along with ssh!) These deprecated my use of chocolatey, and hopefully moves people away from Putty.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319670

Admittedly they're a little hard to differentiate at first glance, but is 'hostile' not pushing things a little too far? There's a long history of derivatives of open source tools having similar-ish names, often differing by a single letter - just look at all the 'make' derivatives: pmake, bmake, fmake, gmake, rmake, nmake, ... to name but a few that Wikipedia mentions [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_(software)#Derivatives

If you launched an alternative search engine called Gooogle, I don't think Google would consider it a friendly move :)

Case in point from 2006 - https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/google-chmoogle/3001845.... :

> A new chemistry search engine has been forced to change its name from ’Chmoogle’ to ’eMolecules’ following pressure from the search engine Google.

We're talking about two categories of people. The software developers would have no problem with stuff like this. Go ahead and create a UX toolkit called Fluttershy.

But if you mess with someone's actual products that make them money you'd probably hear from their legal team.

Very true. I probably should've caveated that I don't actually think it's a good name choice, just that I doubt it was chosen to mislead / as an attack on (lib)curl. Given my own uselessness with naming things sometimes, I tend to be forgiving!

Like we're talking about software developers here. I think it's funny that when a Google engineer does it there's some shadowy motivation to usurp a FOSS downloader library -- like they aren't like the rest of us picking silly names for things.

"Hey, curl is a super useful tool, it would be nice if it used our new fancy network protocol"

"Yeah, what should we name it?"

"Uhh -- wait, I got it. crurl and the library could be libcrurl"

"Hilarious! It's perfect!"

Prefixing a word with another letter is perceptually different from slipping one in the middle, especially when the new letter is one of the four letters already in the name. What Google has done here would be more comparable to releasing a new utility called 'mkake'.

As the author of curl points out, it just looks like a typo. When it's this egregious, your only choices are to assume either incompetence or bad faith.

I mean don't think for a second that mcake couldn't be the name of a build utility that uses baking terms.

    mcake knead && mcake bake

If not for Google's recent spate of scraping people's stuff and publishing it verbatim with zero attribution, they'd get the benefit of the doubt regarding maliciousness. See genius.com's recent accusations

The smell like some "developer's developer" who thinks he can do a better job of libcurl and is so cocksure that he's going with the name libcrurl. Perhaps he'll put his name on it. Unlikely, as that would require skin in the game.

crurl and libcrurl look almost visually identical to curl and libcurl - to the point that many on HN genuinely misread Google's names to be their original counterparts.

Whereas your make examples are much easier to visually differentiate.

If curl was trademarked then they would have a strong case here.

At least those all have the decency to be prefixes. Those are much easier to parse.

Then Google should follow that pattern and call it glibcurl

Which clearly reads as "the g(oogle) implementation of libcurl"

It could easily be mistaken as a GNU implementation (ref glib, gmake, etc).

Fair. But crurl is something my auto-correct extensions would assume I fat fingered.

Chrome and curl seem like competing products. But I agree. I don't see this as that bad relative to the other things they're doing at the moment (i.e. breaking uBlock, user agent blocking).

In any case I admire curl has a binary size of ~1MB, which is 1/5 the size of my filter list for Chrome.

In your examples the first letter is different, the names do not suffer of the confusion issue, me and other people read the name wrong(our eyes or brain tricked us)

Neither of those make derivatives has a likelihood of being readably confused with the original similar to the libcurl/libcrurl comparison.

Slightly different in that case that they're introducing a new different letter at the start. What if I called my tool mmake, or mkake?

don't assume malice when "we suck at names and the first dumb name seems to stick without a marketing department overriding the naming choice" is also an option.

Marketing is busy branding the next 5 years worth of annual messaging applications.

A company I once worked for spent $40,000 to find a good product name. It ended up being the same name people had already pitched for free internally.

They missed a trick by not naming it libgurl.

libcruller is available, is close enough to be clearly related and far enough away not to look like a typo. Also … mmm, tasty crullers.

Propose LibTrurl

Pros: main class c'tor could be called TrurlTheConstructor

Cons: everything else

Is it too late for them to name it “Goorl”?

LibGurgurl

It's doubly egregious given they work for a search engine that will immediately try to autocorrect that.

It'll be even worse when the search engine later magically ranks their's higher even when searching for the original.

The irony is when I've searched for "libcrurl" using Google, I got the result for "libcurl".

Of course it should be renamed to libdivergence. But joking aside, is "crurl" even a word after all?

on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20228237

and lets not be clever, if its a libcurl api for this cronet thing, call it cronet-libcurl or libcurl-cronet or something

How about "gurl" or "gurgle"?