What are the key differences between Apache Thrift, Google Protocol Buffers, MessagePack, ASN.1 and Apache Avro?

Question

All of these provide binary serialization, RPC frameworks and IDL. I\'m interested in key differences between them and characteristics (performance, ease of use, programming

Answer 1

The one big thing about ASN.1 is, that ist is designed for specification not implementation. Therefore it is very good at hiding/ignoring implementation detail in any "real" programing language.

Its the job of the ASN.1-Compiler to apply Encoding Rules to the asn1-file and generate from both of them executable code. The Encoding Rules might be given in EnCoding Notation (ECN) or might be one of the standardized ones such as BER/DER, PER, XER/EXER. That is ASN.1 is the Types and Structures, the Encoding Rules define the on the wire encoding, and last but not least the Compiler transfers it to your programming language.

The free Compilers support C,C++,C#,Java, and Erlang to my knowledge. The (much to expensive and patent/licenses ridden) commercial compilers are very versatile, usually absolutely up-to-date and support sometimes even more languages, but see their sites (OSS Nokalva, Marben etc.).

It is surprisingly easy to specify an interface between parties of totally different programming cultures (eg. "embedded" people and "server farmers") using this techniques: an asn.1-file, the Encoding rule e.g. BER and an e.g. UML Interaction Diagram. No Worries how it is implemented, let everyone use "their thing"! For me it has worked very well. Btw.: At OSS Nokalva's site you may find at least two free-to-download books about ASN.1 (one by Larmouth the other by Dubuisson).

IMHO most of the other products try only to be yet-another-RPC-stub-generators, pumping a lot of air into the serialization issue. Well, if one needs that, one might be fine. But to me, they look like reinventions of Sun-RPC (from the late 80th), but, hey, that worked fine, too.