The streams APIs provide ubiquitous, interoperable primitives for creating, composing, and consuming streams of data. For streams representing bytes, an extended version of the readable stream is provided to handle bytes efficiently, in particular by minimizing copies.

Motivation

Byte streams allow for BYOB readers to be acquired. The default implementation can give a range of different outputs such as strings or array buffers in the case of WebSockets, whereas byte streams guarantee byte output. Furthermore, being able to have BYOB readers has benefits in terms of stability. This is because if a buffer detaches, it can guarantee that one does not write into the same buffer twice, hence avoiding race conditions. BYOB readers also do not need to garbage collect for every read, because we can reuse buffers.

Documentation

Specification

Established standard

Status in Chromium

Blink>Network>StreamsAPI


Enabled by default (tracking bug) in:

  • Chrome for desktop release 89
  • Chrome for Android release 89
  • Android WebView release 89

Consensus & Standardization

After a feature ships in Chrome, the values listed here are not guaranteed to be up to date.

Owners

Intent to Prototype url

Intent to Prototype thread

Last updated on 2021-04-08