The NoMemoryStream

The say there are two hard problems in computer science; cache invalidation, naming things and off by one errors. Hence I can proudly present the NoMemoryStream.

The NoMemoryStream solves a problem you may not have that often; to synchronize reads and writes within a process. For me this was useful when I had some data that I could read from one stream but then I needed to write it to another stream after some transformation. And I didn't want to read it all into memory since it was a lot of data.

I considered an option where I would create a stream that on the read (when the consumer read the data) would read from an underlying stream, transform the data and serve the original write. I could have done that with a variant of the PassThruStream but it would involve caching data in case my transformation produced more data than the consumer would read.

Hence it was just easier to create a stream that would never complete a read before some data was written and writes would never complete until all data was read. While the functionality was pretty straight forward the thing that haunted me for a long time was the name. What do I name this thing?

My first thought was SynchronizedStream but then that felt misleading since a lot of things are asynchronous in how it works. ReadWriteStream didn't feel right either since a lot of streams are read/writable. So in the end I settled for NoMemoryStream since it kind of is a MemoryStream except it really doesn't have an internal buffer. It just uses what ever buffer the read and write calls are providing.

However if you can come up with a better name; please let me know! Oh, and if you din't get it yet, the NoMemoryStream is part of my toolbox in the streams package.