Both protocol buffers and thrift are primarily designed to handle older or newer messages (than your program was compiled with) gracefully. Speed and compactnes

Both protocol buffers and thrift are primarily designed to handle older or newer messages (than your program was compiled with) gracefully. Speed and compactness appear to be secondary goals. (Especially for Thrift, which does not seem concerned with compactness.) Rather than version your protocol, the generated code is able to parse newer messages. If you modify a field on that message and serialize it, even the parts of the message your binary is unaware of will be retained. (As opposed to dropping them.) This means you don't need to push all changes at once, and you can have binaries talk with older and new binaries without problems. The basic wire format is [(tag, payload bytes)*]. The tag identifies both the field "number", and the wire-type of the field. Wire types include fixed 32 and 64, length-delimited ranges, and, for protos, variable length integers. The parser knows how to skip fields of all wire types, so any unknown tags are skipped (and retained in memory) during parsing. Some caveats apply -- you can modify your protocol in several backwards-incompatible ways. For example: add a new required field. Your new binary will reject all serialized messages from your older binaries. Alternatively, change the type of a field. These are pretty easy to avoid, but given enough people on your team, it is bound to happen once or twice.