Development Roadmap¶
Near Term Plans¶
Here is an outline of the development plans over the next ~12 months, as of August 2026.
Botan2¶
As of 2025-01-01, Botan2 has reached end of life. No further releases are planned.
Botan3¶
The following major feature work is currently planned for Botan3:
BLS12-381
HPKE (RFC 9180)
DTLS 1.3
CMS (RFC 5562 et al)
XMSS^MT
HQC, possibly implemented using Rust
Along with the usual optimizations, bug fixes, and refinements.
Botan4¶
Botan4 is currently planned for release in May 2027, though this could easily slip to later in that year.
See the current planning discussion in https://github.com/randombit/botan/issues/4666
Botan4 will continue using C++20 rather than adopting a more recent language version. However it will require slightly more recent compilers than Botan3’s minimum supported compiler versions.
Botan4 is expected to be largely a subtractive major release; deprecated APIs and functionality will be removed, with few additions.
One notable change planned for Botan4 is that in that release, Public_Key will no longer derive from Private_Key. And similarly, specific private keys (for example RSA_PrivateKey) will no longer derive from their corresponding public key type.