Nice that OpenSSL finally relented and provided an API for developers to use to implement QUIC support - last year, apparently.

For those not familiar: until OpenSSL 3.4.1, if you wanted use OpenSSL and wanted to implement HTTP/3, which uses QUIC as the underlying protocol, you had to use their entire QUIC stack; you couldn't have a QUIC implementation and only use OpenSSL for the encryption parts.

QUIC, for those not familiar, is basically "what if we re-implemented TCP's functionality on top of UDP, but we could throw out all the old legacy crap". Complicated but interesting, except that if OpenSSL's implementation didn't do what you want or didn't do it well, you either had to put up with it or go use some other SSL library somewhere else. That meant that if you were using e.g. curl built against OpenSSL then curl also inherently had to use OpenSSL's QUIC implementation even if there were better ones available.

Daniel Stenberg from Curl wrote a great blog post about how bad and dumb that was if anyone is interested. https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/01/17/more-http-3-focus-one...