[c_lebesgue]

I think the complexity of the problem actually speaks in favour of Varnish. The Unix philosophy of writing software is based on the principle of doing one, possibly small thing very well. And that's exactly what Varnish does: it is a reverse-proxy cache that can optionally do a bit of preprocessing on the incoming HTTP requests.

Besides, it's not trivial to write a high performance HTTP cache.

[amelius]

> 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).

[qwertyuiop924]

>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.

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.