After 4 Years of Development, cURL Decides to Abandon Its Rust-Based HTTP Backend Alternative Due to Lack of Use

The developer behind the renowned open-source project cURL, Daniel Stenberg, recently announced in a blog post that the project's attempt to replace its HTTP backend with a Rust-based implementation has failed. Starting with the release of cURL v8.12.0 in February 2025, the related code will be completely removed.

Rust, known for its memory safety features, is one of the most popular programming languages today. Companies like Microsoft and Google have been experimenting with Rust to enhance security. The goal of writing a new backend in Rust for cURL was also aimed at improving security.

Despite the project reaching 95% completion over the past four years, it saw little to no adoption by developers. The lack of interest or sufficient expertise among developers to utilize this feature was a key reason for its discontinuation.

Continuing to develop and maintain the project without user demand was deemed meaningless, leading Daniel to decide to remove the project. This decision aims to reduce code bloat, enhance code flexibility, and decrease complexity.

Although this attempt was unsuccessful, Daniel mentioned that nothing is stopping them from adding support for more and other Rust libraries in the future. This means cURL might still explore building new features and projects based on Rust.

The upcoming cURL v8.12.0 release in February 2025 will eliminate the Rust-based HTTP backend alternative developed over four years, cleaning up the related code to reduce cURL's complexity.

For the full blog post, visit: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/12/21/dropping-hyper/