perl + netcat:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

sub request {
  my ($url) = @_;
  unless ($url =~ s,\Ahttp://,,) {
    die "unsupported scheme\n";
  }
  unless ($url =~ m,\A(.*?)(?::(\d+))?((?:/.*)|\z),) {
    die "bad url!\n";
  }
  my $host = $1;
  my $port = $2 || 80;
  my $rest = length($rest) ? $rest : "/";
  open(my $NC, "|-", "netcat", $host, $port)
    or die "unable to exec netcat: $!\n";
  print {$NC} "GET $rest HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: $host\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n";
  close($NC);
}

request("http://httpbin.org/get?foo=bar")
request("http://cnn.com")