Fwiw, native-tls [0] is intended to solve this problem for the set of uses involving TLS (e.g. hyper [1], reqwest) by using the defacto standard on the platform

Fwiw, native-tls [0] is intended to solve this problem for the set of uses involving TLS (e.g. hyper [1], reqwest) by using the defacto standard on the platform you're on. This means no openssl is necessary on Windows. Longer term, I would like to see some way for a crate consumer to optionally replace openssl with ring [2] where possible. But that's a harder problem, figuring out a common interface, specifying two crates satisfy that interface and are swappable by cargo...classic package management problems really. [0] https://github.com/sfackler/rust-native-tls https://github.com/sfackler/rust-native-tls [1] https://docs.rs/hyper-native-tls/0.2.2/hyper_native_tls/ https://docs.rs/hyper-native-tls/0.2.2/hyper_native_tls/ [2] https://github.com/briansmith/ring https://github.com/briansmith/ring