Biggest differences of Thrift vs Protocol Buffers? [closed]

Question

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).

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.

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.

• Protobuf serialized objects are about 30% smaller than Thrift.
• Most actions you may want to do with protobuf objects (create, serialize, deserialize) are much slower than thrift unless you turn on option optimize_for = SPEED.
• Thrift has richer data structures (Map, Set)
• Protobuf API looks cleaner, though the generated classes are all packed as inner classes which is not so nice.
• Thrift enums are not real Java Enums, i.e. they are just ints. Protobuf has real Java enums.

For a closer look at the differences, check out the source code diffs at this open source project.

As I've said as "Thrift vs Protocol buffers" topic :

Referring to Thrift vs Protobuf vs JSON comparison :

• Thrift supports out of the box AS3, C++, C#, D, Delphi, Go, Graphviz, Haxe, Haskell, Java, Javascript, Node.js, OCaml, Smalltalk, Typescript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, ...
• C++, Python, Java - in-box support in Protobuf
• Protobuf support for other languages (including Lua, Matlab, Ruby, Perl, R, Php, OCaml, Mercury, Erlang, Go, D, Lisp) is available as Third Party Addons (btw. Here is SWI-Prolog support).
• Protobuf has much better documentation and plenty of examples.
• Thrift comes with a good tutorial
• Protobuf objects are smaller
• Protobuf is faster when using "optimize_for = SPEED" configuration
• Thrift has integrated RPC implementation, while for Protobuf RPC solutions are separated, but available (like Zeroc ICE ).
• Protobuf is released under BSD-style license
• Thrift is released under Apache 2 license

Additionally, there are plenty of interesting additional tools available for those solutions, which might decide. Here are examples for Protobuf: Protobuf-wireshark , protobufeditor.

Protocol Buffers seems to have a more compact representation, but that's only an impression I get from reading the Thrift whitepaper. In their own words:

We decided against some extreme storage optimizations (i.e. packing small integers into ASCII or using a 7-bit continuation format) for the sake of simplicity and clarity in the code. These alterations can easily be made if and when we encounter a performance-critical use case that demands them.

Also, it may just be my impression, but Protocol Buffers seems to have some thicker abstractions around struct versioning. Thrift does have some versioning support, but it takes a bit of effort to make it happen.

I was able to get better performance with a text based protocol as compared to protobuff on python. However, no type checking or other fancy utf8 conversion, etc... which protobuff offers.

So, if serialization/deserialization is all you need, then you can probably use something else.

http://dhruvbird.blogspot.com/2010/05/protocol-buffers-vs-http.html