Cap'n Proto VS Apache Thrift

Compare Cap'n Proto vs Apache Thrift and see what are their differences.

Cap'n Proto

Cap'n Proto serialization/RPC system - core tools and C++ library (by capnproto)
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Cap'n Proto Apache Thrift
64 10
11,069 10,097
1.7% 0.4%
9.3 8.9
9 days ago 7 days ago
C++ C++
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Cap'n Proto

Posts with mentions or reviews of Cap'n Proto. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-07.

Apache Thrift

Posts with mentions or reviews of Apache Thrift. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-08-20.
  • Symfony in microservice architecture - Episode I : Symfony and Golang communication through gRPC
    7 projects | dev.to | 20 Aug 2022
    There are various notable implementations of RPC like Apache Thrift and gRPC.
  • What is gRPC popularity? I believe not very popular. And subreddit is small. Why is that?
    2 projects | /r/grpc | 26 Jul 2022
  • Fresh – The next-gen web framework
    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jun 2022
    > "Most of the logic inside the form has to be written two times: in PHP and in vue"

    That's just your choice of how to build your app, right?

    For an internal-facing employee tool - you could've just gone with rendering templates on the server and sending static HTML to the client. Have the business logic and validations take place on the server-side too. I'm sure you have your reasons for doing things the way you did, but it's not like there's only one way to build something like this.

    > "Most enum types are repeated"

    Here's just one of ten-thousand other battle-tested options you can use: https://github.com/apache/thrift/

    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jun 2022
    > That's just your choice of how to build your app, right? You could've avoided this by rendering templates on the server and sending static HTML to the client, keeping the business logic on the server.

    No, that's a requirement on most business cases, my comment stated 'complex and dynamic web apps'. Re-rendering the whole page everytime the user checks a box or clicks a button is (a) terrible UX, (b) hard to track the state between page refresh, (c) wrong practice and (d) bad performance.

    > Here's just one of ten-thousand other battle-tested options you can use: https://github.com/apache/thrift/

    Sure, I should setup a complex and huge dependency for just one of the many problems I highlighted. What a great idea

  • Ask HN: Who Wants to Collaborate?
    58 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jan 2022
  • Deadline Budget Propagation for Baseplate.py
    3 projects | /r/RedditEng | 27 Sep 2021
    Thus, we released Baseplate.py v2.1 with deadline propagation. Each request between Baseplate services has an associated THeader, which includes relevant information for Baseplate to fulfill its functionality, such as tracing request timings. We added a “Deadline-Budget” field to this header that propagates the remaining timeout so that information is available to the following request, and this timeout continues to get updated with every new request made. With this update, we save production costs by allowing resources to work on requests awaiting a response, and gain overall improved latency.
  • parquet2 0.3.0, with native support to read async
    3 projects | /r/rust | 9 Aug 2021
    The biggest addition is native async reading via futures::AsyncRead and futures::AsyncSeek, which required a lot of (to be merged) changes upstream (changes to thrift rust compiler and parquet-format-rs). I placed those changes on a temporary crate until things are released there.
  • proposal: expression to create pointer to simple types #45624
    3 projects | /r/golang | 18 Apr 2021

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Cap'n Proto and Apache Thrift you can also consider the following projects:

gRPC - The C based gRPC (C++, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, PHP, C#)

Protobuf - Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format

FlatBuffers - FlatBuffers: Memory Efficient Serialization Library

ZeroMQ - ZeroMQ core engine in C++, implements ZMTP/3.1

MessagePack - MessagePack serializer implementation for Java / msgpack.org[Java]

Apache Avro - Apache Avro is a data serialization system.

Apache Parquet - Apache Parquet

nanomsg - nanomsg library