Re: [9fans] Thrift RPC

[roger peppe <rogpeppe@gmail.com>]

2009/8/13 Roman Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com>:
> Am I totally missing something or hasn't been the binary RPC
> of that style been dead ever since SUNRPC? Hasn't the eulogy
> been delivered by CORBA? Haven't folks realized that S-exprs
> are really quite good for data serialization in the heterogeneous
> environments (especially when they are called JSON)

i'm not familiar with Thrift, but i've done some stuff with google protobufs,
from which i think Thrift is inspired.

speaking of protobufs, i don't think they're a bad idea.
they're specifically designed to deal
with forward- and backward-compatibility, which is something
you don't automatically get with s-expressions, and if you're
dealing with many identically-typed records, the fact that each field
in each record is not string-tagged counts saves a lot of bandwidth
(and makes them more compressible, too).

we don't use text for 9p, do we?

> and you
> really shouldn't be made to figure out how large is the integer
> on a host foo?

?