Biggest differences of Thrift vs Protocol Buffers?

Question

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

Answer 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).