Libressl (http://www.libressl.org/) is a recent fork of OpenSSL. The goal of libressl is to provide a more secure alternative to openssl and the developers who forked the code feel that openssl is beyond repair at this point. Quoting from libressl website,
LibreSSL is a version of the TLS/crypto stack forked from OpenSSL in 2014, with goals of modernizing the codebase, improving security, and applying best practice development processes.
The best documentation of libressl features (or default configurations) can be found in the release notes from 5.6 version of OpenBSD. Looking at the list, this is an impressive push towards securing the implementation by default. Without worrying too much about the backward compatibility, some of the lesser secure configurations and protocols are simply left out from the implementation.
By dropping support for a bunch of hardware engines and platforms, libressl probably has less things to worry about. For example, dropping support for big-endian i386 and amd64 systems liberates it a bit. With classic adopters of big-endian architectures evenutally becoming bi-endian, there is not much to lose here, in my opinion. However, reusing the standard C library routines like malloc() and snprintf() could take an interesting turn. Dropping kerberos support is interesting too – don’t we still have a lot of academic community working on it?
I like changes like dropping SSLv2 support and stopping the use of current time as random seed among a few others.
There are several discussions in the past on which of these opensource SSL implementations are better. Being a legacy implementation, OpenSSL at this time requires a considerable set of configurations to make it secure. From that view point, libressl might look better in terms of its out of the box readiness for a more secure implementation. However, in the world of automated deployments and continuous integrations, recipes exist to configure openssl to avoid less secure protocols and algorithms.
I am not sure at this point whether libressl will surpass openssl in future in terms of adoption, but sure I am glad to see a drive towards being “more secure by default.”