Thrift vs. Protocol Buffers

Google recently released its Protocol Buffers as open source. About a year ago, Facebook released a similar product called Thrift. I’ve been comparing them; here’s what I’ve found:

Overall, I think Thrift wins on features and Protocol Buffers win on documentation. Implementation-wise, they’re quite similar. Both use integer tags to identify fields, so you can add and remove fields without breaking existing code. Protocol Buffers support variable-width encoding of integers, which saves a few bytes. (Thrift has an experimental output format with variable-width ints.)

The major difference is that Thrift provides a full client/server RPC implementation, whereas Protocol Buffers only generate stubs to use in your own RPC system.

Update July 12, 2008: I haven’t tested for speed, but from a cursory examination it seems that, at the binary level, Thrift and Protocol Buffers are very similar. I think Thrift will develop a more coherent community now that it’s under Apache incubation. It just moved to a new web site and mailing list, and the issue trackeris active.