[nly]

Thrift has pluggable protocols. It comes with 'compact' (protobuf-like), 'dense', 'binary' and json out of the box. It also has pluggable transports and multiple server implementations (threaded, async, etc). I'm personally not seeing any innovation here... I think they just wanted their own version of Thrift such that they could ignore the languages they don't care about.

[antics]

> I think they just wanted their own version of Thrift such that they could ignore the languages they don't care about.

I'll put it bluntly: you have no idea what you're talking about.

Bond v1 was started when Thrift was not production ready. This is Bond v3. There is no conspiracy to make Bond hard to use for technology we "don't care about." In general I'm fine with tempered speculation, but your conclusion here is just lazy, and we both know it. It contributes nothing to the conversation, and spreads FUD for no good reason. We can do better, agree?

Now, to address your comments about customization directly: pluggable protocols are an example. The metaprogramming facilities of Bond are dramatically more rich than those of Thrift. A good example of these facilities: using the standard metaprogramming API and a bit of magic we have been able to trick Bond into serializing a different serialization system's schema types. So, picture Bond inspecting some C# Thrift type (or something), and then populating the core Bond data structures with data it finds there, and then serializing it to the wire.

This is the kind of power you get when you construct the serializer in memory using metaprogramming, and then expose that to the user. The flexibility is frankly unmatched.

[nly]

Microsoft could have pulled a Facebook (They improved the C++ server in FBThrift) and forked or rewritten Thrift, reusing the IDL and existing wire formats if nothing else, and dropped a kickass C# implementation. The result would have been D, Rust, Go, PHP, and Python developers, etc etc, wouldn't have had to go off and reinvent the wheel for the Nth time, for negligible gain in terms of tooling, and an almost certain regression in terms of ecosystem and acceptance. I don't think it's FUD to express a bit of cynicism here or cry NIH Syndrome.

> I'll put it bluntly: you have no idea what you're talking about. Bond v1 was started when Thrift was not production ready. This is Bond v3.

Let me put something bluntly. I don't care who started writing code first. Microsoft are well over half a decade late to the party. Thrift and Protobufs have been public domain since, what... 2007/8?

And frankly, at least on the C++ front, there's not much to get excited about with regard to metaprogramming here. The Avro C++ code generator already produces a small set of template specialisations for each record type, and they're trivial enough to write manually for any existing classes you wish to marshal against your schema. std namespace containers are already recognised through partial template specialisations. MsgPacks implementation also does this. Other more general metaprogramming solutions, like Boost Fusion, are also being used by many, in production, for completely bespoke marshalling.

Don't get me wrong, Bond looks really nice, particularly for C# programmers, and I have respect for the work being done, but I can't get excited about it. It's kind of like someone announcing yet another JSON library or some new web framework when what the industry needs is consensus on formats and APIs. Right now there are so many serialization frameworks that the de-facto standard will just continue to be schema-less JSON and robust tools will remain largely non-existent.

[sapek]

I think your points are valid, especially about wire format compatibility. Bond and Thrift are in fact close enough that providing Thrift compatibility is a real possibility. It wasn't high enough on our priority list to make the cut but we do in fact use some Thrift-based system internally. The impedance mismatch in the type systems are higher between Bond and Avro/Protobuf so we will have to see about those.

I hear you on the fragmentation. I know that this doesn't help the community as an explanation, but big companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft really have a good reasons to control such fundamental pieces of their infrastructure as serialization. Case in point: Facebook has forked their own Thrift project because, I presume, having it as Apache project was too restraining.

FWIW, we plan to develop Bond in public and accept contributions from the community.

[antics]

>> I'll put it bluntly: you have no idea what you're talking about. Bond v1 was started when Thrift was not production ready. This is Bond v3.

> Let me put something bluntly. I don't care who started writing code first. Microsoft are well over half a decade late to the party. Thrift and Protobufs have been public domain since, what... 2007/8?

I think your technical complaints are almost all good and valid. I agree with essentially all of them. I don't want to fork Adam's sibling response here, so I'll leave it at that.

My point is that asserting that Bond was developed so that MSFT could purposefully ignore certain languages is pointedly wrong, and irresponsible considering the dearth of evidence you have to support it. And here you have 3 authoritative comments to say so. I don't understand how you can possibly disagree with this, or be upset that someone would take issue here. It's ok to be wrong.

[chad_walters]

I previously worked on Thirft and have overseen the development of Bond with Adam as the lead developer.

Your characterization of Thrift is accurate and Bond actually has some of the same architectural roots as Thrift. Those features of Thrift were ones that I wanted to preserve in Bond. But we also wanted to expand that plugability to allow for even more flexibility than the core Thrift architecture would allow for -- for example, the ability to support Avro-like "untagged" protocols within the same framework. I believe that the core innovation is in how that gets implemented. Also, we believe that performance is a feature -- our testing has shown that Bond noticeably outperforms Thrift and Protocol Buffers in most cases.

There is no conspiracy or intent to "ignore languages" -- we will release additional languages as they are ready and as we can support them as first-class citizens. We also welcome community involvement.