Thrash

An Elixir library for serialization and deserialization of Apache Thrift messages. 🤘

Requirements

Thrash requires Elixir v1.1 or newer to support Sets and Thrift 0.9.3 or newer to support Maps (see below). Therefore, it is recommended that you use Elixir >= 1.1 and Thrift >= 0.9.3.

Note, when using Thrash you will need to add quaff as a dependency. In your mix.exs file:

defmodule MyProject.Mixfile do
   #...
   
   defp deps do
     [
       # existing deps..
       {:thrash, "~> 0.3"},
       {
         :quaff,
         github: "qhool/quaff",
         tag: "9a4ba378d470beac708e366dc9bacd5a9ef6f016",
         override: true
       }
     ]
   end
end

Philosophy

Thrash is an attempt to provide faster serialization/deserialization to/from Thrift's Binary protocols and to provide an API that is idiomatic for Elixir applications. Compared to the official Erlang Thrift library, Thrash is significantly faster (see below) and works with Elixir structs rather than Erlang records.

Thrash makes heavy use of binary pattern matching and uses Elixir macros to flatten much of the branching logic that exists in the Erlang library. For example, we can use a macro to generate a single binary match specification to extract the typed value of a field from our message as opposed to first extracting the field number and then looking up its type and then performing the appropriate value extraction.

Thrash is geared towards use cases where Thrift is being used primarily as a message format specification, as opposed to a service platform. Thrash does not currently provide an implementation of Thrift Server and may not plug easily into an existing Thrift service without a server adapter. On the other hand, if you are using Thrift as a message specification within your own services, Thrash can provide a significant speedup.

It should be possible to extend Thrash to plug into Thrift services (i.e., provide a Thrift Server implementation). I simply haven't put any effort into implementing that because it doesn't fit my use case.

Usage

Suppose we have a thrift file containing the following (taken from test/thrash_test.thrift).

namespace erl thrash

const i32 MAX_THINGS = 42

enum TacoType {
  BARBACOA = 123,
  CARNITAS = 124,
  STEAK = 125,
  CHICKEN = 126,
  PASTOR = 127
}

struct SubStruct {
  1: i32 sub_id
  2: string sub_name
}

struct SimpleStruct {
  1: i32 id
  2: string name
  3: list<i32> list_of_ints
  4: i64 bigint
  5: SubStruct sub_struct
  6: bool flag
  7: double floatval
  8: TacoType taco_pref
  9: list<SubStruct> list_of_structs
}

First, generate the Erlang thrift code.

thrift -o src --gen erl test/thrash_test.thrift

This should place .erl and .hrl files the src/gen-erl directory.

Next, create Elixir modules to encapsulate these data structures and use the proper Thrash mixins to automatically generate code at compile-time (taken from test/simple_struct.ex).

defmodule TacoType do
  use Thrash.Enumerated
end

defmodule SubStruct do
  use Thrash.Protocol.Binary
end

defmodule SimpleStruct do
  use Thrash.Protocol.Binary, defaults: [taco_pref: :chicken],
                              types: [taco_pref: {:enum, TacoType}]
end

defmodule Constants do
  use Thrash.Constants
end

You can then do things like the following.

# construct a struct - note we can use an atom for the enum
iex> simple_struct = %SimpleStruct{id: 42, name: "my thing", list_of_ints: [1, 2, 5], taco_pref: :carnitas}
%SimpleStruct{bigint: nil, flag: false, floatval: nil, id: 42, list_of_ints: [1, 2, 5], list_of_structs: [], name: "my thing", sub_struct: %SubStruct{sub_id: nil, sub_name: nil}, taco_pref: :carnitas}

# serialize to binary
iex> b = SimpleStruct.serialize(simple_struct)
<<8, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 42, 11, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 8, 109, 121, 32, 116, 104, 105, 110, 103, 15, 0, 3, 8, 0, 0, 0, 3, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 5, 2, 0, 6, 0, 8, 0, 8, 0, ...>>

# deserialize - note we get back the atom value for the enum field
iex> {simple_struct_deserialized, _remainder} = SimpleStruct.deserialize(b)
{%SimpleStruct{bigint: nil, flag: false, floatval: nil, id: 42, list_of_ints: [1, 2, 5], list_of_structs: [], name: "my thing", sub_struct: %SubStruct{sub_id: nil, sub_name: nil}, taco_pref: :carnitas}, ""}

# pulled in constants
iex(1)> Constants.max_things
42

See the moduledocs for Thrash.Enumerated and Thrash.Protocol.Binary for usage details. Note, both of these mixins accept a source argument to allow you to manually define the source structure in your Thrift IDL.

Mix.Tasks.Compile.Thrift

Thrash provides the compile.thrift mix task to help with compiling Elixir projects that use Thrift and Thrash.

See lib/mix/tasks/compile/thrift.ex for detailed documentation of the compile task, including how to modify your mix.exs file so that this task runs automatically.

Data Types

Thrift data types are mapped to Elixir as follows.

Thrift Type	Elixir Type
Boolean	Boolean
Byte	Integer
i16	Integer
i32	Integer
i64	Integer
Double	Float
String	String (binary)
Struct	Struct
Enumerated	Thrash.Enum
Map	Map (%{})
Set	MapSet
List	List ([])

Status

Thrash should provide a complete solution for serialization/deserialization via the Thrift binary protocol. I have been focusing on implementing the functionality that I need while leaving the door open for other functionality. I have no plans to implement other protocols, but would welcome pull requests.

Thrash provides no implementation here for services or servers. It should be possible to build something like that using Thrash and a third party server library. Pull requests are welcomed.

Benchmarks

Thrash is significantly faster at serialization/deserialization than the official Erlang Thrift library for the Thrift Binary protocol. In the interest of full disclosure, this comparison is made using ThriftEx, which is an Elixir adapter for the Erlang library that I wrote. However, ThriftEx only exposes the data structures generated by the Thrift generator - it does not implement any of its own serialization or deserialization.

The bench directory in this project contains a simple benchmark for comparing Thrash and Erlang Thrift library. I'd welcome suggestions on how to improve these benchmarks.

iex(1)> Bench.bench_thrift_ex
Benchmarking Thrift serialization
*** #Function<1.127410406/0 in Bench.bench_thrift_ex/0> ***
1.1 sec    32K iterations   34.59 μs/op

Benchmarking Thrift deserialization
*** #Function<2.127410406/0 in Bench.bench_thrift_ex/0> ***
1.0 sec    16K iterations   64.37 μs/op

Done
:ok
iex(2)> Bench.bench_thrash
Benchmarking Thrash serialization
*** #Function<4.127410406/0 in Bench.bench_thrash/0> ***
1.6 sec   262K iterations   6.23 μs/op

Benchmarking Thrash deserialization
*** #Function<5.127410406/0 in Bench.bench_thrash/0> ***
1.7 sec   524K iterations   3.39 μs/op

Done
:ok

According to these results, Thrash is about 5x faster for serialization and about 18x faster for deserialization compared to the official Erlang library.

Thrift Version Compatibility

Note that Thrift < 0.9.3 is not compatible with Erlang/OTP R18 and up. Therefore, for best results, you should upgrade to at least Thrift 0.9.3.

Your mileage may vary - the main cause of incompatibility is the dict type, which the Thrift Erlang module uses for maps. Your code may be OK if you are not using any maps in your Thrift IDL. If you ARE using maps in your Thrift IDL and you are unable to upgrade Thrift, you might be able to hack in support by modifying the generated Erlang typespecs to replace any instances of the dict() type with dict:dict().

Development & Contribution

If you want to pull down this repository and poke around, check out test/simple_struct.ex and test/namespaced to see how the API is currently being used.

To execute the test suite, you need to first generate the erlang source from the test thrift file.

# fetch deps
mix deps.fetch
# make sure the compile.thrift task is available
mix compile
# compile thrift
THRIFT_INPUT_DIR=test/ mix compile.thrift
# now tests should work
mix test

Standard Elixir and Github workflows apply here. Pull requests are welcome.