[throwaway7767]

LibreSSL is OpenSSL with some of the ugly bits stripped out. It's still aiming for compatibility, and so it retains many of the warts and will continue to do so. It's not a modern library though it may be a bit better than OpenSSL.

BoringSSL is similar, except there you additionally have the problem that google strongly discourages its use by third parties, as they consider it an internal library and semantics can change.

A better example of a modern library would be NaCL or libsodium.

[stephen_g]

That's not accurate - the LibreSSL developers have overhauled the internals fairly substantially in a lot of ways, and they are also making a sensible API on top of it (libtls).