How to use Thrift for message passing instead of RPC

I know that Thrift is mainly aimed at full fledged client-server RPC but looking at the high level architecture it seems to me that it should be perfectly usable for bidirectional message passing as well.

What I would like to build on both ends (C, .NET Core) is following:

Receive method: has reference to a socket, reads a full message, deserializes it, returns it
Send method: has reference to a socket, serializes a given message, sends it to the wire.

I don't need threading servers, ... anything fancy. Essentially what I would love to get on top of what e.g. Protobuffs offers is out-of-box handling of buffering the whole message on receive end & generally message framing.

The problem is that I wasn't able to find any documentation on how to start building that using the current libs (I'm personally interested in .NET Core and C ones) APIs. The only thing I've found is this question but it doesn't really point to any resources.

Solution

Thrift is an RPC- and serialization framework. That implies, that you also may use only the serialization part without RPC.

In combination with messaging systems the way to go is usually (roughly) as follows:

serialize the message into a buffer
send that buffer by whatever means you want
the receiving end(s) deserialize(s) the buffer and process the data

If you plan to send different kinds of messages through the same channel, it may be a good idea to have a union envelope structure that contains all possible message bodies:

 struct MessageOne {
      // contents of this message type
 }

 struct MessageTwo {
      // contents of this message type
 }

 struct MessageThree {
      // contents of this message type
 }

 union MyMessageEnvelope {
      1: MessageOne   one
      2: MessageTwo   two
      3: MessageThree  three
      // easily extendable 
 }

To make it more elegant/reusable, one could also implement a custom transport to fit the needs and to encapsulate the logic a bit more. Thrift's modular structure makes it easy (the post linked by you also refers to that). There are a few samples in the /contrib folder of the source tree which may serve as a starting point.

If you have absolutely no idea where to start: Look at the tutorial and then at the test suite programs, both are great as a learning resource for Thrift starters.