push-stream-min

push-stream--

This is a reimagining of what a push-style stream could be.

push-stream harkens back to the original node.js classic streams but without several of the unrealized-at-the-time blunders of classic streams.

• don't use event emitters. emitters magnify the needed number of objects, and it's not necessary to assign event listeners to properly working streams. when that is needed, pipe to a stream that supports inspection or wrap the stream to be monitored.
• don't support multiple destinations - most streams are piped only to one destination. to use a plumbing metaphore, when you want to connect split one pipe into two, you use a special T or Y shaped connector.
• have a paused property instead of write() returning paused, this means you can know whether your destination is paused before you call write.
• call a resume method on the source stream (that stays the same) instead of assigning and reassigned "drain" listeners. the only property that changes while streaming is the paused boolean. No closures are necessary (which are related to memory leaks and not optimized by js engines) possibly a stream has a buffer (array) but otherwise no memory should be allocated on most simple streams.

motivation

I am writing this because I want muxrpc to have back pressure. muxrpc wraps a simple streaming model inside packet-stream, I'm writing the other in this module to make sure I've throught through the implications of this pattern. I'm not planning on rewriting everything that uses pull-streams to use this!

License

MIT