# Apache Thrift

8 Hacker News commenters recommended Apache Thrift and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Praised for cleanly abstracting data formats and transports, and for handling very large loads at Twitter; the most common caveat is poor documentation.

## Why people recommend it

- Field numbers for serialization schemas (3 comments): "the Protobuf/Thrift approach of using meaningless field numbers in serialization forms is better" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47322538)) "I very much prefer the Protobuf/Thrift model of using numbers to identify fields" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47308569)) "OpenAPI, Thrift and protobuf/gRPC are all far better schema languages." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46270306))
- Abstracts data formats and transports (2 comments): "The best system for this I've ever used was Thrift, which properly abstracts data formats, transports and so on." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195525)) "Some standards had all of this settled from day one: I think Cap'n Proto, Avro and Thrift fit this description." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46741463))
- Proven at Facebook and Twitter scale (2 comments): "Facebook had no open source equivalent and didn't have Google's resources so they created Thrift and open sourced it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49248717)) "made Twitter stable under the load of several hundred million users" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49352638))
- Works well as an RPC option (2 comments): "many RPCs like zeromsg/nng, gRPC, Avro, Thrift, etc work just fine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45943238)) "we have Thrift and similar meaning the bar is definitely higher" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47310437))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [gRPC](https://hackerapproved.com/p/grpc.md): 25 recommend
- [ConnectRPC](https://hackerapproved.com/p/connectrpc.md): 15 recommend
- [tRPC](https://hackerapproved.com/p/trpc.md): 12 recommend
- [Varlink](https://hackerapproved.com/p/varlink.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Apache Thrift", https://hackerapproved.com/p/apache-thrift/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).