Hi Thrift devs, I maintain a Thrift implementation that is specialized for Android (https://github.com/Microsoft/thrifty), and am curious if there is any interest in accepting something like this in Apache Thrift. I’ll try to be brief and summarize.
Briefly, on Android we have a system limitation such that application code is limited in the number of methods that can be referenced – 65,535 to be precise. The generated Java code from the Apache compiler is very heavy in this respect – the app that I work on, for example, has about 300 thrift structs which occupied 35,000 of the methods at our disposal. We ended up hitting the limit, which meant that we could no longer add code to our app without either removing other code or using slow/bug-prone workarounds. With that motivation, we implemented our own Thrift compiler and runtime. The key notions are: - No getters and setters - struct fields are Java fields - No isSet/setIsSet - unset fields are represented by null - No schemes or factories This plays a little loosely with the accepted meanings of required/optional/default requiredness, but at least in client usage it is sound. This approach took us from 35,000 methods to 6,400, a substantial improvement. With all that being said, I think there is room for some of these ideas as a new runtime/codegen pair. Facebook’s fbthrift fork has something similar which, although it doesn’t go as far as what we’ve done, demonstrates the need for such a feature. I’m interested in your thoughts! Thanks, Ben
