Biggest differences of Thrift vs Protocol Buffers

Question

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

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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

User · Answer

There are some excellent points here and I m going to add another one in case someones  path crosses here   Thrift gives you an option to choose between thrift-binary and thrift-compact  de serializer  thrift-binary will have an excellent performance but bigger packet size  while thrift-compact will give you good compression but needs more processing power  This is handy because you can always switch between these two modes as easily as changing a line of code  heck  even make it configurable   So if you are not sure how much your application should be optimized for packet size or in processing power  thrift can be an interesting choice   PS  See this excellent benchmark project by thekvs which compares many serializers including thrift-binary  thrift-compact  and protobuf  https   github com thekvs cpp-serializers  PS  There is another serializer named YAS which gives this option too but it is schema-less see the link above

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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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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

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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

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It s also important to note that not all supported languages compair consistently with thrift or protobuf  At this point it s a matter of the modules implementation in addition to the underlying serialization  Take care to check benchmarks for whatever language you plan to use

User · Answer

I think the basic data structure is different  Protocol Buffer use variable-length integee which refers to variable-length digital encoding  turning a fixed-length number into a variable-length number to save space  Thrift proposed different types of serialization formats  called  quot protocols quot    In fact  Thrift has two different JSON encodings  and no less than three different binary encoding methods   In conclusion these two libraries are completely different  Thrift likes a one-stop shop  giving you the entire integrated RPC framework and many options  supporting cross-language   while Protocol Buffers is more inclined to  quot just do one thing and do it well quot

User · Answer

I think most of these points have missed the basic fact that Thrift is an RPC framework  which happens to have the ability to serialize data using a variety of methods  binary  XML  etc    Protocol Buffers are designed purely for serialization  it s not a framework like Thrift

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

It s also important to note that not all supported languages compair consistently with thrift or protobuf  At this point it s a matter of the modules implementation in addition to the underlying serialization  Take care to check benchmarks for whatever language you plan to use

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

And according to the wiki the Thrift runtime doesn t run on Windows

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

For one  protobuf isn t a full RPC implementation   It requires something like gRPC to go with it     gPRC is very slow compared to Thrift   http   szelei me rpc-benchmark-part1

User · Answer

ProtocolBuffers is FASTER  There is a nice benchmark here  http   code google com p thrift-protobuf-compare wiki Benchmarking  You might also want to look into Avro  as Avro is even faster  Microsoft has a package here  http   www nuget org packages Microsoft Hadoop Avro  By the way  the fastest I ve ever seen is Cap nProto  A C  implementation can be found at the Github-repository of Marc Gravell

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

One obvious thing not yet mentioned is that can be both a pro or con  and is same for both  is that they are binary protocols  This allows for more compact representation and possibly more performance  pros   but with reduced readability  or rather  debuggability   a con   Also  both have bit less tool support than standard formats like xml  and maybe even json     EDIT  Here s an Interesting comparison that tackles both size  amp  performance differences  and includes numbers for some other formats  xml  json  as well

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

I think the basic data structure is different  Protocol Buffer use variable-length integee which refers to variable-length digital encoding  turning a fixed-length number into a variable-length number to save space  Thrift proposed different types of serialization formats  called  quot protocols quot    In fact  Thrift has two different JSON encodings  and no less than three different binary encoding methods   In conclusion these two libraries are completely different  Thrift likes a one-stop shop  giving you the entire integrated RPC framework and many options  supporting cross-language   while Protocol Buffers is more inclined to  quot just do one thing and do it well quot

User · Answer

For one  protobuf isn t a full RPC implementation   It requires something like gRPC to go with it     gPRC is very slow compared to Thrift   http   szelei me rpc-benchmark-part1

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

There are some excellent points here and I m going to add another one in case someones  path crosses here   Thrift gives you an option to choose between thrift-binary and thrift-compact  de serializer  thrift-binary will have an excellent performance but bigger packet size  while thrift-compact will give you good compression but needs more processing power  This is handy because you can always switch between these two modes as easily as changing a line of code  heck  even make it configurable   So if you are not sure how much your application should be optimized for packet size or in processing power  thrift can be an interesting choice   PS  See this excellent benchmark project by thekvs which compares many serializers including thrift-binary  thrift-compact  and protobuf  https   github com thekvs cpp-serializers  PS  There is another serializer named YAS which gives this option too but it is schema-less see the link above

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

ProtocolBuffers is FASTER  There is a nice benchmark here  http   code google com p thrift-protobuf-compare wiki Benchmarking  You might also want to look into Avro  as Avro is even faster  Microsoft has a package here  http   www nuget org packages Microsoft Hadoop Avro  By the way  the fastest I ve ever seen is Cap nProto  A C  implementation can be found at the Github-repository of Marc Gravell

User · Answer

One obvious thing not yet mentioned is that can be both a pro or con  and is same for both  is that they are binary protocols  This allows for more compact representation and possibly more performance  pros   but with reduced readability  or rather  debuggability   a con   Also  both have bit less tool support than standard formats like xml  and maybe even json     EDIT  Here s an Interesting comparison that tackles both size  amp  performance differences  and includes numbers for some other formats  xml  json  as well

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

I think most of these points have missed the basic fact that Thrift is an RPC framework  which happens to have the ability to serialize data using a variety of methods  binary  XML  etc    Protocol Buffers are designed purely for serialization  it s not a framework like Thrift

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

And according to the wiki the Thrift runtime doesn t run on Windows

[serialization] Biggest differences of Thrift vs Protocol Buffers?

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