From Thrift Site - “Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, Smalltalk, and OCaml.” When I initially tried to install thrift I had some difficulty because of an error which follows. This error makes you think you need something to do with boost but I am pretty sure the issue was that I was missing gcc-c++