Thrift has been officially frozen for almost two years and unofficially for longer. [1] Meanwhile, maintaining Thrift support through changes like 8099 has been a substantial investment.
I propose deprecating Thrift now and removing support in 4.0, i.e. Nov 2016 if tick-tock goes as planned. I note that only 7% of our survey respondents [2] are using Thrift-only, and and those users are often on old releases (1.1 and 1.2), i.e. unlikely to upgrade to 4.x anyway. Another 20% of users are using a mix of Thrift and CQL. Some have been unable to completely migrate because CQL doesn’t quite provide every feature from Thrift. The last such outstanding issue is mixing static and dynamic Thrift “columns” in a single table. We have an issue open to address this [3]. I think it is reasonable to either deprecate Thrift immediately in 3.2 or to wait until 10857 is committed in 3.4. [1] http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/cassandra-dev/201403.mbox/%3ccaldd-zim6knmr7f_zcpvpqk0b2g919tttathiuofnvlztaw...@mail.gmail.com%3E [2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FegCArZgj2DNAjNkcXi1n2Y1Kfvf6cdZedkMPYQdvC0/edit#gid=0 [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-10857 -- Jonathan Ellis Project Chair, Apache Cassandra co-founder, http://www.datastax.com @spyced
