yassl is a (in comparison) small SSL/TLS library that libcurl can be built to use instead of using one of the other SSL/TLS libraries libcurl supports (OpenSSL, GnuTLS, NSS and QSSL). However, yassl differs somewhat from the others in the way that it provides an OpenSSL-emulating API layer so that in libcurl we pretty much use exactly the same code for OpenSSL as we do for yassl.

yassl claimed this libcurl support for several years ago and indeed libcurl builds fine with it and you can even do some basic SSL operations with it, but the emulation is just not good enough to let the curl test suite go through so lots of stuff breaks when libcurl is built with yassl.

I did this same test 15 months ago and it had roughly the same problems then.

As far as I know, the other three main libraries are much more stable (the QSSL/QsoSSL library is only available on the AS/400 platform and thus I don’t personally know much about how it performs) and thus they remain the libraries I recommend users to select from if they want something that’s proven working.