What are the biggest pros and cons of Apache Thrift vs Google's Protocol Buffers?
15 Answers
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
Settype - 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).
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.
- 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.
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.
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 & performance differences, and includes numbers for some other formats (xml, json) as well.
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:
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 "protocols"). 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 "just do one thing and do it well".
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.
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