> Has there been any memory safety issues with Nginx?
Yes, of course. For example, nginx uses openssl, so it was vulnerable to Heartbleed, something Caddy can never be vulnerable to. Part of the point of Caddy is to stop deploying C code to the edge.
> Nginx is easily extendable and has far, far larger plugin ecosystem than Caddy.
Nginx is also 4x older. I'd say for just a few years we're doing pretty good with our very young plugin ecosystem. A lot of this depends on the community. If you want it, make it so!
> So does nginx, with "nginx -s reload"
I think he was referring to a REST/JSON API that isn't unix-specific.
In addition to OpenSSL's Heartbleed, nginx had its own functionally-identical "Heartbleed" bug in its header parsing. Exact same impact.
(I don't think anyone made a big deal about it at the time; I knew about it because our team at Matasano discovered it independently just an hour or two before someone else filed the bug).
I'd argue it's much easier to write Go plugins for Caddy than C plugins for nginx, and it's much easier to build. See the plugin docs here: https://caddyserver.com/docs/extending-caddy
First: Thanks for contributing to Caddy! I have not used it in production, but it has been nice for some small projects where I needed something fast and easy.
But, I do feel like in a discussion where you are making a direct comparison between a project you are a part of and a competing project, it is the fair thing to do to disclose that you are a project member.
I know you're not trying to hide it - I see you making comments elsewhere in here that reference it - but not everyone will necessarily see those, and people would probably like to know if they are reading a comparison written by someone who has a vested interest in the things being compared.
- Simpler configuration language, the Caddyfile
- Single static binary, no external dependencies
- Built with Go, so memory safety is essentially solved
- Very pluggable if you need to add additional behaviour (simple Go module plugin system)
- Config API with graceful reloads
- Plenty more, just scroll through the homepage to get an idea: https://caddyserver.com/