A lot of the needed functionality might already be available in the Rust ecosystem, while a large amount of the code in Nginx predates general HTTP utility or e

A lot of the needed functionality might already be available in the Rust ecosystem, while a large amount of the code in Nginx predates general HTTP utility or even Unicode libraries. I assume that software that has grown organically with the web has gathered a lot of cruft and hacks that might not be needed anymore and make further development a lot harder. It might be a worthwhile experiment to take a common set of HTTP libraries in Rust and add Nginx-specific configuration parsing and some other bits together and see how far that kind of hackery would get. With a good BDFL and some community involvement, it would be a great way to get the ball rolling.