> Finally, taking an OpenSSL public API and attempting to trace the implementation to see how it is implemented has become an exercise in self-flagellation. Being able to read the source to understand how something works is important both as part of self-improvement in software engineering, but also because as sophisticated consumers there are inevitably things about how an implementation works that aren’t documented, and reading the source gives you ground truth. The number of indirect calls, optional paths, #ifdef, and other obstacles to comprehension is astounding. We cannot overstate the extent to which just reading the OpenSSL source code has become miserable — in a way that both wasn’t true previously, and isn’t true in LibreSSL, BoringSSL, or AWS-LC.

OpenSSL code was not pleasant or easy to read even in v1 though and figuring out what calls into where under which circumstances when e.g. many optimized implementations exist (or will exist, once the many huge perl scripts have generated them) was always a headache with only the code itself. I haven't done this since 3.0 but if it regressed so hard on this as well then it has to be really quite bad.

I think this part is really worth engaging with:

> Later, moving public key parsing to our own Rust code made end-to-end X.509 path validation 60% faster — just improving key loading led to a 60% end-to-end improvement, that’s how extreme the overhead of key parsing in OpenSSL was.

> The fact that we are able to achieve better performance doing our own parsing makes clear that doing better is practical. And indeed, our performance is not a result of clever SIMD micro-optimizations, it’s the result of doing simple things that work: we avoid copies, allocations, hash tables, indirect calls, and locks — none of which should be required for parsing basic DER structures.

I was involved in the design/implementation of the X.509 path validation library that PyCA cryptography now uses, and it was nuts to see how much performance was left on the ground by OpenSSL. We went into the design prioritizing ergonomics and safety, and left with a path validation implementation that's both faster and more conformant[1] than what PyCA would have gotten had it bound to OpenSSL's APIs instead.

[1]: https://x509-limbo.com

I'm glad that they're considering getting rid of OpenSSL as a hard dependency. I've built parts of pyca/cryptography with OpenSSL replaced or stripped out for better debugging. OpenSSL's errors just suck tremendously. It shouldn't be tremendously difficult for them to do it for the entire package.

Though I'd also love to see parts of pyca/cryptography being usable outside of the context of Python, like the X.509 path validation mentioned in other comments here.

By the way, pyca/cryptography is a really excellent cryptography library, and I have confidence that they're making the right decisions here. The python-level APIs are well thought-out and well documented. I've made a few minor contributions myself and it was a pleasant experience.