Author here: the main driver for writing curlie was not about the slowness of httpie but about all the features I was missing from curl. As curlie is just a wrapper on top of curl, you get all the great options of curl like http/2, http/3 support, advanced TLS options etc.

For one-off runs it doesn't feel slow, but it gets more noticeable if you're running it in a loop or against a server you know is fast (i.e. local Go server), but consider this output as an example (running from an AWS server):

  # time http google.com >/dev/null 2>&1
  real 0m0.337s
  user 0m0.259s
  sys 0m0.036s
  
  # time curlie google.com >/dev/null 2>&1
  real 0m0.042s
  user 0m0.011s
  sys 0m0.005s
  
  # time curl google.com >/dev/null 2>&1
  real 0m0.039s
  user 0m0.009s
  sys 0m0.004s

Ok, sounds like a problem with Python’s startup speed. They have been improving it little by little but not sure how far they’ll get.

One other thing is that httpie is typically an interactive tool. If I were hitting services in a loop I’d just write a Python/requests script to do it rather than bash+httpie.