Biggest differences of Thrift vs Protocol Buffers? [closed]

Solution 1:

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).

Solution 2:

Another important difference are the languages supported by default.

• Protocol Buffers: Java, Android Java, C++, Python, Ruby, C#, Go, Objective-C, Node.js
• Thrift: Java, C++, Python, Ruby, C#, Go, Objective-C, JavaScript, Node.js, Erlang, PHP, Perl, Haskell, Smalltalk, OCaml, Delphi, D, Haxe

Both could be extended to other platforms, but these are the languages bindings available out-of-the-box.

Solution 3:

RPC is another key difference. Thrift generates code to implement RPC clients and servers wheres Protocol Buffers seems mostly designed as a data-interchange format alone.