Biggest differences of Thrift vs Protocol Buffers?

serialization protocol-buffers thrift
Bob picture Bob · Sep 16, 2008 · Viewed 122.2k times · Source

What are the biggest pros and cons of Apache Thrift vs Google's Protocol Buffers?

Answer

hazzen picture hazzen · Sep 16, 2008

They both offer many of the same features; however, there are some differences:

  • Thrift supports 'exceptions'
  • Protocol Buffers have much better documentation/examples
  • Thrift has a builtin Set type
  • Protocol Buffers allow "extensions" - you can extend an external proto to add extra fields, while still allowing external code to operate on the values. There is no way to do this in Thrift
  • I find Protocol Buffers much easier to read

Basically, they are fairly equivalent (with Protocol Buffers slightly more efficient from what I have read).

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