aip: Async Iterable Pipeline

Vitaly Akimov’s article laid out an interesting approach to decoupling business logic based on es2018 async generator syntax. What stood out to me is the opportunity to get more flexibility without paying extra. Looks like it is possible to write your code in reactive programming manner without having to actually load something as big as RxJS (or similar) library. Even better: in this case it seems that smaller library means smaller API surface to learn.

Of course all the aforementioned benefits are balanced by corresponding drawbacks like having to use less expressive idioms or the need to “re-invent wheel” at times. It’s all about trade-offs (as usual). But I think that it’s good to have an option of using smallest possible library that attempts to offload most of it’s API onto the programming language itself.

So this library is my take on the approach described above, and it seems like it is a success: minified and gzipped version of this library is just a touch more than a kilobyte. Most of the library source is very similar to code from the article cited. I basically only tried to add a bit of readability and sensible interfaces on top.

Documentation

Since this library is so small that you probably better off just taking a look at the source code (it’s less than 300 lines and contains comments on most important parts of API). Tests might also be useful to look at as well. You can also take a look at completed example from the article (modified to use aip).