I always thought Java was the original protobuf library. Of the big three (PB, Avro, Thrift) only protobufs have a great modern RPC library included. I suspect

I always thought Java was the original protobuf library. Of the big three (PB, Avro, Thrift) only protobufs have a great modern RPC library included. I suspect more people start using PB because of gRPC. Unfortunately many people are still stuck with JSON over HTTP. I believe gRPC is more popular among systems where mobile clients dominate. As a side note, if you expect to programmatically change your records (e.g. inject a new field on the server into a record received from a client) Avro is a much better choice. Avro also has a stronger schema migration story. But both are row-oriented formats with nearly identical IDLs anyway.