Yeah, so @rapid-apartment-37923 nothing at all stable and direct. Most of the pieces though by demonstration - the missing piece of the path is the platform identifying directories in the final ls:

jsirois@gill ~/dev/pantsbuild/pants (master) $ ./pants options --scope=GLOBAL --name=pants_bootstrapdir
pants_bootstrapdir = /home/jsirois/.cache/pants (from HARDCODED)

jsirois@gill ~/dev/pantsbuild/pants (master) $ ./pants options --scope=thrift-binary
thrift-binary.supportdir = bin/thrift (from HARDCODED)
thrift-binary.version = 0.9.2 (from HARDCODED)

jsirois@gill ~/dev/pantsbuild/pants (master) $ ls -l ~/.cache/pants/bin/thrift/linux/x86_64/0.9.2/
total 39232
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jsirois jsirois 40170146 Dec 20  2016 thrift