Well if by contemporary you mean written by Google builds with Bazel and runs in Docker, stuff like Envoy is pretty good and it uses Joyent's HTTP parser which

Well if by contemporary you mean written by Google builds with Bazel and runs in Docker, stuff like Envoy is pretty good and it uses Joyent's HTTP parser which is more readable than the pigeon C parsing Varnish likes to do. But Varnish understands UNIX much better than Envoy does, as evidenced by its portability and the things you've read in the blog post. Compared to Squid then hands down Varnish is the best. I'm not sure if it's better than open source GFE but it's pretty good. None of them go as fast as redbean of course. The blog post talks about how they only need 18 system calls to serve a local asset. redbean only needs one system call: writev(). That's because redbean cheats by having a novel design. The zip central directory means we don't need file system system calls. The invariant RDTSC instruction means we can also have timestamps without context switching.