As a general rule, when you find that many people have come up with different solutions to a similar problem it's a good bet that there's actually not a single

As a general rule, when you find that many people have come up with different solutions to a similar problem it's a good bet that there's actually not a single good solution available. "Facebook couldn’t possibly use something written at Google, so they built “Thrift,” which hardly lives up to its name, but at least has a less shitty version of RPC in it." Thrift predates the public release of protobuf.