We deserve a better streams API for JavaScript
We deserve a better streams API for JavaScript2026-02-27James M Snell24 min readHandling data in streams is fundamental to how we build applications. To make streaming work everywhere, the WHATWG Streams Standard (informally known as “Web streams”) was designed to establish a common API to work across browsers and servers. It shipped in browsers, was adopted by Cloudflare Workers, Node.js, Deno, and Bun, and became the foundation for APIs like fetch(). It’s a significant undertaking, and the people who designed it were solving hard problems with the constraints and tools they had at the time.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…
