This article critiques the WHATWG Streams Standard for JavaScript and proposes an alternative API design that runs 2x to 120x faster across all major runtimes.
- •The Web Streams API was designed in 2014-2016, predating async iteration (ES2018), resulting in verbose reader/lock patterns for common operations
- •The locking model (getReader()/releaseLock()) is error-prone: forgetting releaseLock() permanently breaks the stream with no clear diagnostic information
- •BYOB (bring your own buffer) reads add significant complexity for both users and implementers but see little real-world adoption
- •The proposed alternative uses JavaScript language primitives and achieves dramatic performance gains in Cloudflare Workers, Node.js, Deno, Bun, and all major browsers
- •Performance improvements stem from fundamentally different design choices that leverage modern JS features, not micro-optimizations
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