The state of HTTP clients, or why you should use httpx

Every year, a few articles come out with a title similar to “the best ruby http clients of the year of our lord 20xx”. Most of the community dismisses them as clickbait, either because of the reputation of the content owner website, companies pushing their developers to write meaningless content in their company tech blog for marketing purposes, or AI bots trained on similar articles from the previous decade and serving you the same contet over and over.And they’re right. Most of the times, these articles are hollow, devoid of meaningful examples or discussions about relevant features, trade-offs or performance characteristics, and mostly rely on shallow popularity metrics such as total downloads, number of stars on GitHub, or number of twitter followers from the core maintainer, to justify selections. They’ll repeat what you know already for years: faraday is downloaded 20 million times a year, httparty parties hard, no one likes net-http, and there are too many http clients in the ruby community.