From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: References: Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 09:42:26 +0100 Message-ID: From: roger peppe To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [9fans] Thrift RPC Topicbox-Message-UUID: 452ef5e0-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 2009/8/13 Roman Shaposhnik : > 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? ?