Thrift: Is it possible to do only serialization with C++ Thrift library?

Question

With C++ Apache Thrift library, is it possible to use only Serialization/Deserialization and not use RPC services?

As I understand from this page, it is possible to

Answer 1

I realize that this question was asked a while ago. I encountered a similar use case recently (with an additional requirement - sending the serialized bytes to a Kafka cluster). Here's my answer with more complete code snippets that illustrate how the serialization and sending tasks can be done.