Thrift vs. Protocol Buffers – Digital Digressions by Stuart SierraOverall, 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
