Thrift was (and is) Facebook's answer to protocol buffers. Like protocol buffers it a language and platform independent way of storing structured data. But Thr

Thrift was (and is) Facebook's answer to protocol buffers. Like protocol buffers it a language and platform independent way of storing structured data. But Thrift adds and RPC mechanism on top of that. Google had their own protocol buffers based RPC (called Stubby) that wasn't open source at the time (we're talking 10-15 years ago).