Can't you use framed transport to handle streaming better?
(my previous company gave up on thrift when we discovered it couldn't do recursive data structures (i.e. trees), and made our own interface -> service layer on top of protocol buffers instead).
As far as I know, you still have to read the entire response into memory for parsing. You could write your own streaming parser, but as far as I know the main compiled bindings don't support streaming response handling. I would love to be proven wrong though!
(my previous company gave up on thrift when we discovered it couldn't do recursive data structures (i.e. trees), and made our own interface -> service layer on top of protocol buffers instead).