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"90% of the time, the gains from streaming aren't worth the added effort."

I... won't go so far as to say "I think", but "I have a pet theory" that part of the reason for this is actually effect rather than cause. That is, developers generally do not think in streaming, so they build libraries that are based on doing things non-streaming, which have libraries built on top of them that assume non-streaming, which have frameworks built on top of them that assume non-streaming, etc. etc. and so on, and the end result is that it's just way harder to get streaming working than it would be if more developers were comfortable with it.

The web world even more so, which for pretty much its entire run has been conceptualized by developers as returning chunks of content, even though the tech nominally had more streaming support than that, being (until recently) TCP sockets under the hood. Web developers even made it a virtue that once a chunk was emitted, all context was dropped on the floor. (I see this as less a virtue than an accidental way old CGI stuff worked that got raised into a requirement.)

Historically speaking, only the minimal things that needed to support streaming to work at all supported it. I am seeing a slow trend towards more streaming-thinking though, and it's getting easier to stream things.

This is an explanation of why I think the quoted text is true, not a disagreement. I think in a more perfect world it wouldn't be true, and I have hope that it won't be true in the medium-term future, but today it often is, depending on details of your local environment.




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