Read/write vs stream
⚓ Rust 📅 2026-06-11 👤 surdeus 👁️ 1What exactly is a "streaming" interface? Is it always meant "as opposed to read/write"?
From what I can tell, read/write pass in slices to buffers, that the application keeps ownership of, and return length and implement read/write traits (and thus can be used with things like {std,tokio}::io::copy()) while stream interfaces tend to take in or return entire buffers (where ownership is passed to/returned from the library), and the reading part implements Iterator (or equivalent).
XY: I'm developing an interface that allows transferring blobs, and the caller can request to be given a "file like" object (implements read/write traits) or "stream like" object (implements Iterator for the receiver), and I'm wondering if I'm using the appropriate (read: non-confusing) terminology.
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