They must all be GRPC users. Developers are pushing GRPC and protobuf pretty hard in companies. The next step down the road is to move to envoy as the load balancer. Otherwise these protocols don't work well over traditional HTTP infrastructure.
I work for a billions company. Nginx is still fine. Youll need to be prepared to pay for better operations, management, visibility, and protocol support. You can either pay them or build it in house, but you will want to pay.
I'd add another reason: so many people only use nginx as a reverse proxy, and the proxy configuration feels duct-taped on sometimes. Envoy being written as a proxy first makes it a better interface IMHO.
I've always looked at it (esp. with STL) as kind of a "Swiss-Army-Chainsaw" and you were going to shoot your eye out. Maybe that view is old and things are better - but I learned a while back that sending a young gun into a C++ application's code-base would lead to a world of pain)
Maybe that learning is no longer accurate? What do you think?
Platform wars are over-ish. We have the same compile targets. What they call "Undefined Behavior) is relegated to ... well ... platforms we are not supporting.
C is fast - simple - easy(ish) to learn, and easy to "fuzz" in testing.
I can't speak to LUA - but C++ looks like a mine-field (to me).
Why do you declare that C++ is "better"? (Seriously interested - I don't even know enough these days to have a debate. I just gave up on the C++ hell-hole years (decades?) ago, and maybe should have kept up)
There are many reasons which lead to a cleaner codebase, some of them are: RAII, smart pointers, constant types, reusable containers, standard algorithms library, cleaner way to define interfaces, etc.
Overall our experience is that C++ code is smaller, simpler to write/read, and has a smaller chance of mistakes than equivalent logic written in C.
Of course many of this points are relevant only for relatively modern C++ (c++11/c++14 or newer), before that the cost/benefit ratio was much less clear.
I'm not declaring that C++ is better for everything. In our case it is better because it makes this part of the infrastructure more sustainable: there are more engineers who can code well in C++ vs C in our company and industry overall. Also it is easier to code in C++ as it is general purpose programming language with a lot of libraries available, open source projects, community around it etc.
You have different experiences than I do - so our conclusions will differ.
That said - I "feel" as if C++ is a dangerous serpent of a language. Maybe I need to spend 6 months re-acquainting myself in complex environments with more developers than just me, and re-evaluate that presumption on a medium-size project.
I think what they're trying to say is that developing plugins for nginx in Lua is not great. It's not a rant about languages.
This has to do with nginx not having the required features (features blocked behind the paid edition or GRPC non existent), forcing to develop plugins in Lua to compensate (the only supported language) and Lua is too slow for this sort of stuff (processing Gbps of traffic in real time is no joke).
That makes sense. Thanks. (I still prefer C - but I am admittedly getting old and C++ sucked in the mid-90s or so)
EDIT: BTW -- I am not going to argue with LUA throughput. I'm still not sure what the thinking was there (maybe time-to-prototype?) - but C plugins run faster than Apache's do. By, like, a lot. (And I like Apache! ...Having used it since 1996)
Of course, you can serve static assets using Envoy, and maybe even connect a fascgi app without very much hassle. But it's quite a bit less straightforward.
