Interesting that it relies on OpenSSL, either dynamically from the OS or vendored at compile time. I wonder what the implications would be for using something like rustls. You’d get TLS batteries included and kill a large external dependency… but possibly introduce behavior changes to low-level cryptographic operations, which is scary.
Still, the maintainers stated that they don’t plan to implement Python’s readline module because they already have a rust implementation of readline. A similar argument could apply here - use native rust implementations of dependencies and expose them via the expected Python APIs. This would break some ambitious Python programs, but those probably wouldn’t consider alternative runtimes anyway.