Sean McArthur, creator of the hyper HTTP library:
hyper in curl is nearly complete, but it needs a champion. Without a partner actively engaged that wants to enable and ship, it’s now on the path for being deprecated and removed.
But the upkeep of the feature isn’t free, in both the curl and hyper repositories. Because of that, and without a committed organization wanting to ship it, it’s planned to be removed at the start of 2025.
The hyper in curl project is an interesting case study. On the one hand, many folks want improved memory safety in their projects, but on the other I’m not sure many users of curl are keen to be the first to make the switch to the hyper backend.
Also, a lot of software that consumes the library probably isn’t in a position to control the backend—they just use what is installed on the host system. This is why Sean is asking for a backing vendor or Linux distribution that does have control over the backend.
Additionally, I imagine many projects that are in control of the backend are not keen to introduce the Rust dependency into their build, instead sticking with the devil they know. For projects that are open to Rust, I suspect they’re more likely to use hyper directly, thus the curl backend is not particularly relevant to them. Nonetheless, it would be a shame to see the hyper backend removed as this is a great opportunity in one of the most widely used libraries in the world.