I haven’t used thrift in anger. The general feeling I get when talking to people about it is that it doesn’t feel very well maintained and its less feature rich than gRPC but thats all hearsay. If I was going to take on the operational burden of an RPC layer like that then I would probably just spend the time, albeit enormous, to get gRPC working. It seems to me like thats where most people are moving.
But for us synchronous api calls over http 1.1 have worked OK thus far. We’re at pretty high scale and we’re still not at the scale where we need to be highly optimizing our transport layers. Our primary technical bottleneck is the encoding and decoding time and json is the slowest in that arena. The much larger problem is the ability to scale our teams, our knowledge, and the duplication of effort required to maintain a bunch of different clients. Something like twirp helps to alleviate those pain points and is easier to add to our existing stack because it works over http 1.1 and retains the existing semantics for sending requests. You could probably achieve the same thing with json schema or swagger. But my experience with those tools has been poor and I’m not sold on them as a sustainable solution.
