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I agree. There are a few other pieces of software I'd put in the same class... here's two examples I can think of now:

* Varnish (the "Notes from the architect" are a great read: https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectNotes)

* QEMU (actually, pretty much anything Fabrice Bellard has touched)

Great example! Wish I'd included it in my original list.

Tcl[1], which @antirez has also held up as incredibly lucid code.

haproxy probably qualifies too.

zlib, lua & luajit

Postgre

nginx

Thanks for the kind words mythz! And for your important role in the Redis community.

Couldn't agree more.

Redis code base is like a best-practice document.