Rationale

Key reasons of why you might want to use this library...

Native JavaScript Protocol

This library operates on JavaScript native types (sync and async iterables), and outputs the same. This means, no integration commitment, you can make use of the library in any context, without imposing any compatibility concerns.

• Every synchronous pipeline produces a native synchronous iterable
• Every asynchronous pipeline produces a native asynchronous iterable

This separation also has a profound impact on performance, as explained below.

Clear separation of synchronous and asynchronous processing

If you look at the Benchmarks, synchronous iteration can outperform asynchronous 200x times over. This is a strong indication of just how bad an idea it is to process synchronous and asynchronous sequences as one. And yet, this is the path many frameworks are taking, sacrificing performance to the convenience of processing unification.

Also, in the real world applications, the amount of asynchronous processing will always be significantly lower than synchronous. Ignoring this means throwing performance and scalability under the bus. To design a good product, you need a clear picture of your data flow, in order to be able to improve on performance and scalability efficiently, and that does require separation of synchronous and asynchronous layers in your data processing.

To illustrate this, let's start with a bad code example:

import {pipe, toAsync, filter, distinct, map, wait} from 'iter-ops';

const data = [12, 32, 357, ...]; // million items or so

const i = pipe(
    toAsync(data), // make asynchronous
    filter(a => a % 3 === 0), // take only numbers divisible by 3
    distinct(), // remove duplicates
    map(a => service.process(a)), // use async service, which returns Promise
    wait() // resolve each promise
);

for await(const a of i) {
    console.log(a); // show resolved data
}

And here's what a good version of the same code should look:

import {pipe, toAsync, filter, distinct, map, wait} from 'iter-ops';

const data = [12, 32, 357, ...]; // million items or so

// syncronous pipeline:
const i = pipe(
    data,
    filter(a => a % 3 === 0),
    distinct()
);

// asynchronous pipeline:
const k = pipe(
    toAsync(i), // enable async processing
    map(a => service.process(a)),
    wait()
);

for await(const a of k) {
    console.log(a); // show resolved data
}

By separating synchronous processing pipeline from asynchronous one, in the above scenario of filtering through a lot of initial data, before asynchronous processing, we can achieve performance increase of easily 100 times over.

This library keeps things separately, both through explicit type control and run-time, so there is never any confusion of whether you're working with synchronous or asynchronous data.