Recursion in structures

[Jens Geyer]

Hi *,

I know, I read it somewhere but I couldn't find it again, neither in the 
code, the whitepaper nor in the Wiki. But somewhere there is a remark or 
comment about why recursive types are not supported in Thrift. However, we 
frequently run into a situation where we experience the need for such 
structures, e.g. with hierarchical data:

   struct treenode
   {
     1: string name
     2: list<treenode> childs
   }

Similarly, one could not do things like the following with Thrift:

   struct foo
   {
       1: bar  somefield
   }

   struct bar
   {
       1: foo  anotherfield
   }

I would really like to see Thrift enhanced here. Especially transporting 
hierachical data through a Thrift-based API causes a lot of extra headaches. 
So here are my questions:

(1) Could anyone provide a pointer to the comment or remark I mentioned 
above?

(2) What could prevent us from enhancing the IDL this way? Particularly, do 
you see any obious (or not-so-obvious) major problems here with the parser 
and the generators?

(3) Do all supported languages allow such constructs?


Thanks in advance for any input you might have,
JensG