Dependencies
A key to making good software is to build on top of other great software. By using libraries that many others use, we reinvent the same things fewer times and we get more reliable software as there are more people using the same code.
A whole slew of features that curl provides require that it is built to use one or more external libraries. They are then dependencies of curl. None of them are required, but most users want to use at least some of them.
HTTP Compression
curl can do automatic decompression of data transferred over HTTP if built with the proper 3rd party libraries. You can build curl to use one or more of these libraries:
Getting compressed data over the wire uses less bandwidth, which might also result in shorter transfer times.
c-ares
curl can be built with c-ares to be able to do asynchronous name resolution. Another option to enable asynchronous name resolution is to build curl with the threaded name resolver backend, which then instead creates a separate helper thread for each name resolve. c-ares does it all within the same thread.
nghttp2
This is a library for handling HTTP/2 framing and is a prerequisite for curl to support HTTP version 2.
openldap
This library is one option to allow curl to get support for the LDAP and LDAPS URL schemes. On Windows, you can also opt to build curl to use the winldap library.
librtmp
https://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/
To enable curl's support for the RTMP URL scheme, you must build curl with the librtmp library that comes from the RTMPDump project.
libpsl
https://rockdaboot.github.io/libpsl/
When you build curl with support for libpsl, the cookie parser knows about the Public Suffix List and thus handles such cookies appropriately.
libidn2
https://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/libidn2/manual/libidn2.html
curl handles International Domain Names (IDN) with the help of the libidn2 library.
SSH libraries
If you want curl to have SCP and SFTP support, build with one of these SSH libraries:
TLS libraries
There are many different TLS libraries to choose from, so they are covered in a separate section.
QUIC and HTTP/3
To build curl with HTTP/3 support, you need one of these sets: