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

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.