line by line stream readers from npm, a case study

gistfile1.md

Stream, npm, cli utilities all awesome. But some tools get repeated waaayyy too much. For example, node line-by-line stream utilities are everywhere. But they can't be created equal can they? What's the criteria for this tool? In my mind, a great line by line stream tool should:

1. follow the node.js stream api as closely as possible
2. Use the new stream2 api if possible and remain backwards compatible
3. perform well (there can be a pretty significant performance difference between different parsing methods)
4. be very well documented and tested

• lazylines
• node-line-input-stream
• LineStream
• node-lines
• pipeline
• linestream
• node-liner
• node-byline

1. interface

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looks like the most noteworthy difference between the interfaces of is the use of events. some of these interfaces go like this:

var line_tool = require('line tool')

fs.createReadStream('thing.txt')
  .pipe(line_tool)

line_tool.on('line', function(line) {
  // do stuff with line
})

2. backwards compatibility

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........

3. performance

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how do you benchmark streams?