Comment by cryptonector | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryptonector | Hacker News Reader

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> In this case, it seems to me that OpenSSL has chosen to prioritize DX and broader accessibility over performance. Even as we have seen some performance improvements since the initial 3.0 release, it is still not where it was.

Clearly you're wrong. They _chose_ to prioritize some things over performance for 3.0. They did not make the same choice for subsequent versions. Thus it's wrong to say that "OpenSSL has chosen" -- no, they've not! The choice you say they made was temporary. It wasn't even a conscious choice.

> The only issue I see is that this may not have been clearly thought out or communicated,

They did not make a conscious choice, and they did not stick to that choice later. You are twisting things.

> There is another potential issue with rolling out an LTS release that was not "fully baked"

Like everyone else, OpenSSL is moving to rapid release trains. Is 3.0 an LTS? Yes. Is 3.1 an LTS? No. Is 3.2 an LTS? Yes. Just upgrade and move on.

> Overall, we should look to refine and understand the goals for the project, and be clear on the priorities of those leading and maintaining it.

You're crying over spilt milk. The mess got cleaned up. The process was open and the team responsive. That instills confidence and defeats the FUD.

Actually, I'm trying to give the team the benefit of the doubt and assume good intentions. That may not be the case, but its a reasonable place to start.

And yes, they did choose to prioritize DX over performance - that was the major driving factor behind the re-architecture of the 3.x version. You stated this yourself: "OpenSSL 3.0 was a release that added new, cleaner APIs and deprecated older, uglier APIs, so the focus was on that and not performance"

If you read the article, it is clear that while they have improved some of the worst performance issues, the core architectural problems (like being dynamic and poor multi-threading support).

In fact, that is the entire point of the article. Even if you look at OpenSSL's self-reported metrics, you can see that there are improvements from the 3.0 release, but still not up to the level of 1.1.1 or the other libraries tested.

Upgrading an LTS library is a problem for many orgs... which is why we have LTS versions in the first place. Suggesting it is not a problem just because you don't have a problem upgrading doesn't remove the problem.

Finally, you can see in the article that these points were brought up many times over many years, and even again after 3.0 was released, and the OpenSSL team was not responsive.

No crying over spilled milk here - simply trying to clarify that this is a problem for some users, and actually trying to support the OpenSSL team's decisions... even if they aren't the ones I made. AGain - assuming good intentions.

It does no one any good to blindly attack or blindly defend anyone. Lets be honest about the problems, honest about the issues, and honest about the choices the team has chosen to make.

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