(9) How does Facebook use Apache Thrift? - Quora

(9) How does Facebook use Apache Thrift? - Quora

Thrift is used by quite a number of internal (mostly back-end) services at Facebook.

I don't work on the Graph API, but I presume one of the biggest reasons why it doesn't use Thrift is just to keep the API as simple/flexible/lightweight as possible. HTTP+JSON is arguably much simpler to debug than most thrift protocols.

Additionally, it makes it very easy for most developers to understand what's happening when they interact with the API. One important aspect of Thrift is that it attempts to abstract away almost everything that happens below the surface of the client layer; So, when something goes wrong, it can be much harder to figure out where the problem is and how to fix it.

Finally, HTTP and JSON libraries are pretty commonly found in many different languages and frameworks out there already (and they're widely used and well known/supported). You won't find Thrift libraries included with most core/standard libraries.

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