But after years of building on Web streams — implementing them in both Node.js and Cloudflare Workers, debugging production issues for customers and runtimes, and helping developers work through far too many common pitfalls — I've come to believe that the standard API has fundamental usability and performance issues that cannot be fixed easily with incremental improvements alone. The problems aren't bugs; they're consequences of design decisions that may have made sense a decade ago, but don't align with how JavaScript developers write code today.
This post explores some of the fundamental issues I see with Web streams and presents an alternative approach built around JavaScript language primitives that demonstrate something better is possible.
In benchmarks, this alternative can run anywhere between 2x to 120x faster than Web streams in every runtime I've tested it on (including Cloudflare Workers, Node.js, Deno, Bun, and every major browser). The improvements are not due to clever optimizations, but fundamentally different design choices that more effectively leverage modern JavaScript language features. I'm not here to disparage the work that came before — I'm here to start a conversation about what can potentially come next.
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I'm publishing this to start a conversation. What did I get right? What did I miss? Are there use cases that don't fit this model? What would a migration path for this approach look like? The goal is to gather feedback from developers who've felt the pain of Web streams and have opinions about what a better API should look like.
From the article:
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