rustls VS rfcs

Compare rustls vs rfcs and see what are their differences.

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rustls rfcs
57 666
5,417 5,674
3.3% 0.9%
9.9 9.7
1 day ago 5 days ago
Rust Markdown
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

rustls

Posts with mentions or reviews of rustls. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-28.
  • Pingora: HTTP Server and Proxy Library, in Rust, by Cloudflare, Released
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Feb 2024
    Being able to use rustls as a drop-in replacement for openssl is on their roadmap: https://github.com/rustls/rustls/blob/main/ROADMAP.md#future...

    So that'll certainly one option in the future.

    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Feb 2024
    Rustls claims to support TLS 1.2 as well (https://github.com/rustls/rustls)
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Feb 2024
  • Alternative to openssl for reqwest https with client certs.
    3 projects | /r/rust | 8 Dec 2023
  • What are the scenarios where "Rewrite it in Rust" didn't meet your expectations or couldn't be successfully implemented?
    16 projects | /r/rust | 9 Jun 2023
    I also studied this question on FFI several weeks ago in terms of "rewrite part of the system in Rust". Unexpected results could be semantic issues (e.g., different error handling methods) or security issues (FFI could be a soundness hole). I suggest going through the issues of libraries that have started rewriting work such as rust-openssl or rustls (This is the one trying to rewrite in whole rust rather than using FFI; however, you will not be able to find the mapping function in the C version and compare them). I hope this helps!
  • A brief guide to choosing TLS crates
    5 projects | /r/rust | 9 Jun 2023
    Now for rust implementation of tls. Certificates can be loaded in two ways. * Finds and loads certificates using OS specific tools3 * Uses a rust implementation of webpki4 for loading with certificates5
  • Microsoft is busy rewriting core Windows library code in memory-safe Rust
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Apr 2023
    > Ring is mostly C/Assembly

    Crypto needs to be written in Assembly to ensure that operations take a constant time, regardless of input. Writing it in a high level language like C or Rust opens you up to the compiler "optimising" routines and making them no longer constant time.

    But you already knew this. And you also knew that the security audit (https://github.com/rustls/rustls/blob/master/audit/TLS-01-re...) of ring was favourable

    > No issues were found with regards to the cryptographic engineering of rustls or its underlying ring library. A recommendation is provided in TLS-01-001 to optionally supplement the already solid cryptographic library with another cryptographic provider (EverCrypt) with an added benefit of formally verified cryptographic primitives. Overall, it is very clear that the developers of rustls have an extensive knowledge on how to correctly implement the TLS stack whilst avoiding the common pitfalls that surround the TLS ecosystem. This knowledge has translated reliably into an implementation of exceptional quality.

    You said

    > a standard library with feature flags and editions would make rust ridiculously much more productive

    What's the difference between opting into a library with a feature flag and opting in with a line in Cargo.toml? Let's say you want to use the de-facto regex library. Would it really be ridiculously productive if you said you wanted the "regex" feature flag instead of the "regex" crate?

    I do agree that the standard library does need a versioning story so they can remove long deprecated functions. Where it gets complicated is if a new method is reintroduced using the same name in a later edition.

  • Is Rust really safe? How to identify functions that can potentially cause panic
    6 projects | /r/rust | 12 Mar 2023
    I believe it is more relevant than you think: servers running in containers, web assembler tasks running in browsers, embedded devices and kernels with total control of the system, all have the ability to do something more sensible than plain out SIGABRT or similar, and in many the case is not that the complete system is falling down. For example RustTLS is looking into allowing fallible allocators and as a pretty general-purpose library that seems like a nice feature. I do wish ulimit -v worked in a sensible manner with applications.
  • MCloudTT: An asynchronous MQTT v5 Broker written in Rust
    2 projects | /r/rust | 28 Feb 2023
    I think it is this issue. But I'll get back to you tomorrow
  • Architecture with rust
    5 projects | /r/learnrust | 9 Feb 2023
    Then you also might need to use rustls , some kind of oauth crate and a persistence layer of choice (database).

rfcs

Posts with mentions or reviews of rfcs. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-25.
  • Coroutines in C
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Feb 2024
  • Uv: Python Packaging in Rust
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Feb 2024
    Congrats!

    > Similarly, uv does not yet generate a platform-agnostic lockfile. This matches pip-tools, but differs from Poetry and PDM, making uv a better fit for projects built around the pip and pip-tools workflows.

    Do you expect to make the higher level workflow independent of requirements.txt / support a platform-agnostic lockfile? Being attached to Rye makes me think "no".

    Without being platform agnostic, to me this is dead-on-arrival and unable to meet the "Cargo for Python" aim.

    > uv supports alternate resolution strategies. By default, uv follows the standard Python dependency resolution strategy of preferring the latest compatible version of each package. But by passing --resolution=lowest, library authors can test their packages against the lowest-compatible version of their dependencies. (This is similar to Go's Minimal version selection.)

    > uv allows for resolutions against arbitrary target Python versions. While pip and pip-tools always resolve against the currently-installed Python version (generating, e.g., a Python 3.12-compatible resolution when running under Python 3.12), uv accepts a --python-version parameter, enabling you to generate, e.g., Python 3.7-compatible resolutions even when running under newer versions.

    This is great to see though!

    I can understand it being a flag on these lower level, directly invoked dependency resolution operations.

    While you aren't onto the higher level operations yet, I think it'd be useful to see if there is any cross-ecosystem learning we can do for my MSRV RFC: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3537

    How are you handling pre-releases in you resolution? Unsure how much of that is specified in PEPs. Its something that Cargo is weak in today but we're slowly improving.

  • RFC: Rust Has Provenance
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Jan 2024
  • The bane of my existence: Supporting both async and sync code in Rust
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jan 2024
    In the early days of Rust there was a debate about whether to support "green threads" and in doing that require runtime support. It was actually implemented and included for a time but it creates problems when trying to do library or embedded code. At the time Go for example chose to go that route, and it was both nice (goroutines are nice to write and well supported) and expensive (effectively requires GC etc). I don't remember the details but there is a Rust RFC from when they removed green threads:

    https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/0806be4f282144cfcd55b...

  • Why stdout is faster than stderr?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Jan 2024
    I did some more digging. By RFC 899, I believe Alex Crichton meant PR 899 in this repo:

    https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/899

    Still, no real discussion of why unbuffered stderr.

  • Go: What We Got Right, What We Got Wrong
    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jan 2024
    Rust shares Go's "errors as values + panics" philosophy. Rust also has a standard library API for catching panics. Its addition was controversial, but there are two major cases that were specifically enumerated as reasons to add this API: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1236-stab...

    > It is currently defined as undefined behavior to have a Rust program panic across an FFI boundary. For example if C calls into Rust and Rust panics, then this is undefined behavior. Being able to catch a panic will allow writing C APIs in Rust that do not risk aborting the process they are embedded into.

    > Abstractions like thread pools want to catch the panics of tasks being run instead of having the thread torn down (and having to spawn a new thread).

    The latter has a few other similar examples, like say, a web server that wants to protect against user code bringing the entire system down.

    That said, for various reasons, you don't see catch_unwind used in Rust very often. These are very limited cases.

    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jan 2024
  • Ask HN: What's the fastest programming language with a large standard library?
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2023
    Rust has had a stable SIMD vector API[1] for a long time. But, it's architecture specific. The portable API[2] isn't stable yet, but you probably can't use the portable API for some of the more exotic uses of SIMD anyway. Indeed, that's true in .NET's case too[3].

    Rust does all this SIMD too. It just isn't in the standard library. But the regex crate does it. Indeed, this is where .NET got its SIMD approach for multiple substring search from in the first place[4]. ;-)

    You're right that Rust's standard library is conservatively vectorized though[5]. The main thing blocking this isn't the lack of SIMD availability. It's more about how the standard library is internally structured, and the fact that things like substring search are not actually defined in `std` directly, but rather, in `core`. There are plans to fix this[6].

    [1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/arch/index.html

    [2]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/simd/index.html

    [3]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/72fae0073b35a404f03c3...

    [4]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/88394#issuecomment-16...

    [5]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/memchr#why-is-the-standard-lib...

    [6]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3469

  • Progress toward a GCC-based Rust compiler
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Dec 2023
    Mara's blog post also describes the benefits of standardizing Rust.

    Since she created the RFC for standardizing Rust (https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3355) and is also on the team that is working on Rust standardization (https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2023/11/15/spec-visio...), I think she was making the point that Rust has good controls in place for adding features while compatibility, not that "Rust does not need a standard".

    If she really believed that Rust does not need a standard, why would she create the RFC and join the team working on the effort?

    Rust is a great language. There is no reason why it should not have a standard to better formalize its requirements and behaviors.

    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Dec 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing rustls and rfcs you can also consider the following projects:

rust-native-tls

rust-openssl - OpenSSL bindings for Rust

mkcert - A simple zero-config tool to make locally trusted development certificates with any names you'd like.

ring - Safe, fast, small crypto using Rust

webpki - WebPKI X.509 Certificate Validation in Rust

rust-crypto - A (mostly) pure-Rust implementation of various cryptographic algorithms.

RustCrypto - Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data Algorithms: high-level encryption ciphers

sodiumoxide - [DEPRECATED] Sodium Oxide: Fast cryptographic library for Rust (bindings to libsodium)

Ockam - Orchestrate end-to-end encryption, cryptographic identities, mutual authentication, and authorization policies between distributed applications – at massive scale.

OpenSSL - TLS/SSL and crypto library

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

bubblewrap - Low-level unprivileged sandboxing tool used by Flatpak and similar projects