The intent of this package is to eventually provide a fully native Rust implementation of the TLS protocol. It uses rust-crypto (https://github.com/randombit/rustcrypto/) to access OpenSSL's implementation of basic primitives like AES, RC4, SHA-1, and RSA.
The reasoning is that while implementing the entire TLS protocol in a memory unsafe language is quite difficult, OpenSSL's implementations of the basic crypto operations are very well optimized and often constant time.