[karmakaze]

Thrift supports many serializations both binary and human readable that you could choose at runtime, say for debugging.

I never did use the feature, having got tired of using Thrift for other reasons (e.g. poor interoperability Java/Scala).

[morelisp]

Wait, thrift interoperates poorly with Java? We are stuck using it in go because another (Java-heavy) team exposes their data via it, and the experience has been awful even for a simple service. So what is it good in?

[karmakaze]

This was a long way back. Specifically, the Scrooge (or Finagle) generator for Scala and Java supported different versions of Thrift libraries. Maybe the problem was related to having a project with both Java and Scala and over the wire interop would have been fine--don't remember the exact details.