Trying to transfer github comments from https://github.com/python/peps/pull/272#pullrequestreview-41388700: I said:

Tornado has been doing TLS in an event-loop model in python 2.5+ with just wrap_socket, no MemoryBIO necessary. What am I missing? MemoryBIO certainly gives some extra flexibility, but nothing I can see that's strictly required for an HTTP client. (Maybe it comes up in some proxy scenarios that Tornado hasn't implemented?)

There were three main responses: - MemoryBIO is necessary to support TLS on windows with IOCP. Tornado's approach requires the less-efficient select() interface. This is valid and IMHO the biggest argument against using Tornado instead of Twisted in requests. Even if requests is willing to accept the limitation of not being able to use IOCP on Python 2, it may be tricky to arrange things so it can support both Tornado's select-based event loop on Python 2 and the IOCP-based interfaces in Python 3's asyncio (I'd volunteer to help with this if the requests team is interested in pursuing it, though). - wrap_socket is difficult to use correctly with an event loop; Twisted was happy to move away from it to the MemoryBIO model. My response: MemoryBIO is certainly a *better* solution for this problem, but it's not a *requirement*. Twisted prefers to do as little buffering as possible, which contributes to the difficulty of using wrap_socket. The buffering in Tornado's SSLIOStream simplifies this. Glyph reports that there are still some difficult-to-reproduce bugs; that may be but I haven't heard any other reports of this. I believe that whatever bugs might remain in this area are resolvable. - MemoryBIO supports a wider variety of transports, including pipes. There's a question about unix domain sockets - Tornado supports these generally but I haven't tried them with TLS. I would expect it to work.