I did an online presentation with this name for the Rust Linz meetup, on January 27 2022. This is the recording:

The individual slides are also available.

Content quickly

In this presentation I talk about how libcurl’s most important aspect is the stable ABI and API. If we just maintain those, we can change the internals however we like.

libcurl has a system with build-time selected components, called backends. They are usually powered by third party libraries. With the recently added HTTP backend there are now seven “flavors” of backends.

A backend can be provided by a library written in rust, as long as that rust component provides a C interface that libcurl can use. When it does, it being rust or not is completely transparent and a non-issue for libcurl.

curl currently supports components written in rust for three different backends:

• HTTP – by hyper
• TLS – by rustls
• HTTP/3 – by quiche

None of these backends are yet “feature complete”, but we are moving slowly towards that. Your help is appreciated!