Tag: thrift
On FaceBook's Thrift semantics, code generation, and OCaml
Date: 2010-July-18 @ 23:42
Tags:
asn.1,
ocaml,
thrift
Note: The obligatory TL;DR section is at the very end of this text.
The ASN.1 rant
After co-founding Echo, I had to put the asn1c's development on hold, for the sheer lack of time. (If you don't know what my asn1c is, think of it as the most evolved open source ASN.1 compiler.) Despite suspending development, I've been tracking the ASN.1 evolution, as well as the emergence of some newer technologies competing with what ASN.1 has to offer. I am referring to FaceBook's Thrift, Google's Protocol Buffers, Cisco's Etch, and the likes. Yet to this day I had no opportunity to actually use any of those in production.
I have my own personal score with the ASN.1 world. The standard is laden with design-by-committee complexity, no doubt evolved to “address the real world demands”. Its mind-numbing standardese and semantics effectively prohibit any newcomer from ever entering this field and producing a decent new compiler. So, we're stuck with something like 2.5 alive ASN.1 compilers covering some 3 mainstream languages (C++, C#, Java). The commercial products are often cost prohibitive: they're squarely aimed at rich telecom market. Where would a small Ruby or Python startup go? (While I am at it, Erlang has a free decent ASN.1 compiler, you know).
Yet, there's an opposite side to this complexity. Many things you struggle with or “invent” for the purpose of better data serialization have already been invented in the ASN.1 world. Things like broiled-to-perfection TLV-based encodings (BER/DER/CER), bitwise Packed Encoding Rules (competing with gzip'ing your serialized binary blob), Information Object Classes (think of SNMP MIB macros on steroids), or Encoding Control Notation have a lot to offer and learn from.
But I should stop kicking that dead horse. Let's try Thrift for a change.