varnish is a lot faster!
Before choosing Squid 3.0 I've discussed this with percona guys (which I really trust since I worked there quite a while) and they shared with my some really weird stories from their experience (on boardreader.com) with Varnish (constant memory leaks, crashes, etc). So, I decided to go with Squid and pretty happy about the result so far.
C is faster than Ruby, but you're not suggesting building their apps in C. Why not? Because capabilities matter, too.