regards,

regards,

Three years later, here's where things stand:

HTTP/2 by default, HTTP/3 over QUIC when the server advertises it via Alt-Svc or via DNS HTTPS record. No configuration needed, the client negotiates automatically. This alone accounts for most of the performance difference in practice. A quick benchmark (1000 requests to httpbingo.org/get, reproduction steps in the README)

niquests 0.551s (HTTP/2) aiohttp 1.351s (HTTP/1.1) httpx 2.087s (HTTP/2)

Security defaults that should have been there years ago. OS trust store instead of bundled certifi. Certificate revocation checks via OCSP or CRL. Encrypted Client Hello. Post-quantum key exchange. None of this is exotic anymore - browsers have shipped most of it - but Python clients still don't do it.

DNS. DNS-over-HTTPS, DNS-over-TLS, DNS-over-QUIC, DNSSEC validation. Per-session resolver configuration.

Other things that accumulated over three years: Happy Eyeballs, WebSocket and SSE over all three HTTP versions, in-memory certificates for mTLS, connection-level telemetry (DNS/TCP/TLS timings via response.conn_info), native Unix socket support, and as of 3.18, experimental Pyodide/WASM support.

Migration is boring by design: import niquests as requests. Existing auth flows, cookie jars, .netrc, adapters - they all work. We also maintain compatibility shims for requests-mock, responses, and betamax.

Happy to discuss anything related to the project or HTTP in general.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47672321

Points: 3

# Comments: 5

I am the original author of "rtls". For years now, the Python experts are arguing about OpenSSL mandatory aspect in the distribution, and many other went into compiling CPython themselves against LibreSSL, or AWS-LC, (...)

I wanted the broader community to be able to just "run an alternative ssl backend" without effort.

The main goal is for anyone running a mere high level http client to be able to leverage a memory-safe TLS backend.

Behind the scene it's Rustls, with aws-lc-rs engine.

I'm also the author of Niquests http client, a drop in replacement for Requests. https://github.com/jawah/niquests and yes rtls is supported transparently with it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47612046

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

more seriously, all that is needed is our collective effort. I've done my part by scarifying a lot of personal time for it.

fwiw, HTTP/2 is twelve years old, just saying.

I am trying to resolve what you've seen. For years of hard work.

I'm the maintainer of Niquests.

For years, Python's Requests library was the gold standard, but it has been under feature freeze. As the web moved on, the Python ecosystem fractured: we got aiohttp (async only) and httpx (great, but currently struggles in high throughput scenarii for years with no visible solution merged so far).

I wanted the beautiful, ergonomic API of requests, but I wanted it to speak the modern web and solve most seen struggles around HTTP consumption. So I built Niquests as a drop-in replacement, you can literally do import niquests as requests. I didn't want to reinvent the wheel, I wanted to start on solid ground. Requests and urllib3 are both rock solid, so this was the starting point, learning from them and extend them for the modern web.

Under the hood, it's a different beast. I've added:

* HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 over QUIC out of the box * Multiplexing and full thread/task safety (fixed the old concurrency bottlenecks over thousands of TCP connections) * OS trust store support by default (no more certifi issues) * Both sync and async support (in one library) * Deep DNS control (DoH, DoQ, DoT, DNSSEC), "Happy Eyeballs" for fast connects * Integrated WebSocket extension over HTTP/1, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3 * Works in WASM (Pyodide), and compatible with ASGI/WSGI apps * And much more(...)

Here’s a real-world benchmark: Niquests completes a 1000-request multiplexed workload in 0.55s, compared to httpx (2.08s) and aiohttp (1.35s). See https://gist.github.com/Ousret/9e99b07e66eec48ccea5811775ec1... to verify yourself. And yes it does scale as long as your server can take it.

I've worked hard to make this the most advanced Python HTTP client. without losing the simplicity and readability we love from requests.

Would love feedback, technical questions (especially around HTTP/2+ and multiplexing!), or discussion about the state of Python HTTP clients.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362442

Points: 5

# Comments: 2