HttpClient client = HttpClient.newBuilder()
        .version(Version.HTTP_1_1)
        .followRedirects(Redirect.NORMAL)
        .connectTimeout(Duration.ofSeconds(20))
        .proxy(ProxySelector.of(
           new InetSocketAddress("proxy.example.com", 80)
        ))
        .authenticator(Authenticator.getDefault())
        .build();

       HttpResponse<String> response = client.send(request, BodyHandlers.ofString());

       System.out.println(response.statusCode());
       System.out.println(response.body());

The stdlib may not be the best, but the fact all HTTP libs that matter are compatible with net/http is great for DX and the ecosystem at large.

It is not built for convenience. It has no methods for simply posting JSON, or marshaling a JSON response from a body automatically, no "fluent" interface, no automatic method for dealing with querystring parameters in a URL, no direct integration with any particular authentication/authorization scheme (other than Basic Authentication, which is part of the protocol). It only accepts streams for request bodys and only yields streams for response bodies, and while this is absolutely correct for a low-level library and any "request" library that mandates strings with no ability to stream in either direction is objectively wrong, it is a rather nice feature to have available when you know the request or response is going to be small. And so on and so on.

There's a lot of libraries you can grab that will fix this, if you care, everything from clones of the request library, to libraries designed explicitly to handle scraping cases, and so on. And that is in some sense also exactly why the net/http client is designed the way it is. It's designed to be in the standard library, where it can be indefinitely supported because it just reflects the protocol as directly as possible, and whatever whims of fate or fashion roll through the developer community as to the best way to make web requests may be now or in the future, those things can build on the solid foundation of net/http's Request and Response values.

Python is in fact a pretty good demonstration of the risks of trying to go too "high level" in such a client in the standard library.

The h11, h2, httpcore stack is probably the closest thing to what the Python stdlib should look like to end the fragmentation but it would be a huge undertaking for the core devs.

And while this article [1] says "It's been around for a while", it was only added in .NET Framework 4.5, which shows it took a while for the API to stabilise. There were other ways to make web requests before that of course, and also part of the standard library, and it's never been "difficult" to do so, but there is a history prior to HttpClient of changing ways to do requests.

For modern dotnet however it's all pretty much a solved problem, and there's only ever been HttpClient and a fairly consistent story of how to use it.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/extensions/htt...