What is “Thrift?” Thrift is a software platform created by Facebook developers that enables programming languages to convert to other programming languages seamlessly. The programming languages include C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby.
Thrift is used to power various Facebook products such as Search, Mobile, Sharing, and Notes. Facebook has announced today that it is open-sourcing the platform.
Because Facebook is the 2nd largest website that runs on PHP (behind Yahoo!), Thrift was created and memcache is utilized. Memcache was originally developed by LiveJournal. The whitepaper for Thrift is available on the Thrift Facebook Developers page and a Thrift Developers Group was created within Facebook.
