7 ms·
Heterogeneous collections, discriminated unions, and GADTs can be implemented easily in either thrift or protobuf by leveraging inclusion of custom type-tagged
by antonovka2 17y ago
Heterogeneous collections, discriminated unions, and GADTs can be implemented easily in either thrift or protobuf by leveraging inclusion of custom type-tagged messages/data.
However, while the encodings are absolutely sufficient to represent these data structures -- if you so choose -- my experience dictates that keeping serialized messages typed and as simple as possible is advantageous from the perspective of long-term maintenance and interoperability.
- blasdel 17y agoOf course you can implement custom type-tagged blobs, but that's not using thrift or protobufs -- it's your own nebulous SOAP-style bullshit.
- antonovka2 17y agoThey're not "blobs" if they are also protobuf/thrift messages themselves.
- blasdel 17y agoThat's certainly cleverer, but it's still a nested user-implemented unsound type-system.