"Nice, but they are solving a problem that is not all that hard."
Apparently it was hard if it took that long to get a great, clean, FOSS solution to the problem.
Apparently it was hard if it took that long to get a great, clean, FOSS solution to the problem.
To be clear, I'm not trying to denigrate this project in any way. I'm just saying that the complexity of the problem should be taken into account here.
Besides, it's not trivial to write a high performance HTTP cache.
Certainly true.
I guess that for me "beautiful code" invents some abstractions that transform a problem that initially seems dauntingly difficult into something that is easy to reason about. A proxy cache does not, for me, satisfy the first part of this premise, although I can imagine that the details of such a project take a lot of effort (hence "not trivial", but in a different way).
Well then, look no further than any RDBMS.
Seriously, for as much as people sometimes rag on the relation model, it is amazing for its power and relative simplicity.
They're certainly easier to write than a lot of software. Their simplicity is deceptive, though, when real-world isdues come into play. Esp if result is to be beautiful.
HTTP intermediate services are easy to write, but operate in a hostile and chaotic environment; they are very very hard to make reliable, performant, interoperable, secure, forgiving, and compliant. To achieve that and still have elegant code is really something so yay Varnish.
I'm a bit of a fan of the Dovecot mail server source for similar reasons (but I'm biased, having made a small contribution and got into the authors file)