How does this compare to Google's protocol buffers, or Facebook's Thrift serialization framework?

All covered in this blog post: http://github.com/blog/531-introducing-bert-and-bert-rpc

Which seems to come down to "we don't like explicit protocol definitions via IDLs, think they are somehow incompatible with dynamic typing ethos, and didn't understand that Protobuf/Thrift can very easily be leveraged to provide dynamic self-describing messages without having to define a whole new encoding/protocol specification".

See also:

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=895607

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=895280

Off topic, but this is the first time I've seen typekit in action -- it's really cool!