Coming back to UNIX world, the equivalent that *I think* you might be
interested is (and has been echoed by a few others) LIB-CURL.
http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/
http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-tutorial.html
Simplest Sample Code: http://curl.haxx.se/lxr/source/docs/examples/simple.c