Make binary a full-fledged type of its own
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Key: THRIFT-429
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-429
Project: Thrift
Issue Type: Improvement
Affects Versions: 0.1
Reporter: Chad Walters
Fix For: 0.1
>From the point of view of the protocol abstraction, the 'binary' type looks
>like a full-fledged type but under the covers the implementation is such that
>the wire format encodes 'string' and 'binary' types with the same type code.
>I'd like to see 'binary' become a full-fledged type instead.
This wart of the implementation has at least one strange and unexpected
implication: protocol implementations must be careful that 'string' values can
be skipped properly by way of the readBinary() method. This affects protocols
where the wire format of 'string' is different from the wire format of
'binary'. I encountered this problem when implementing the JSON protocol.
I am not sure if there are other implications of this wart -- it's possible
there are others that have not been surfaced yet.
This is unfortunately a backwards-compatibility breaking change and has
implications for those who have large investments in persisted Thrift
structures. I realize that the down-side here so far is fairly limited -- the
JSON protocol was able to work around this without too big a problem. We had
discussed this a year ago and got some level of agreement that we wouldn't do
this until there were some other significant backwards-compatibility breakage.
However, it only becomes harder over time for such a change to be made, as more
people persist more and more Thrift data. I think it is pretty clear that in
retrospect we would not have designed things such that the same type code is
used on the wire for 'string' and 'binary'. I wonder if the current users of
Thrift who would be impacted by this now would agree to take on the pain of
this change now so that future users will not have to go through this pain
(also, their own pain might be lessened by doing this sooner rather than later).
I am raising the issue and targeting for 0.1 to prompt a little bit of
discussion.
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