TLDR: Streams are nothing more than a convenient way of handling callbacks, and they can cause a zombie outbreak if you are not careful, because callbacks ARE a type of reference to the creating object.
The Unnecessarily Long Introduction
Between RxJS clocking in at 15 million weekly (yes, seriously, weekly) downloads and RxDart exploding in popularity, it looks like streams, as a paradigm, are here to stay. But what the hell are streams? Are they a special language syntax? A magical data structures that just somehow “flow” data? Or, are they just a convenient way of handling async callbacks with a ton of functionality (and complexity) built on top of a very simple concept? Let’s take a look.
Initially, I started to learn about streams for a Bluetooth project I was writing in Flutter. In case you have been living under a rock, or simply don’t keep up with all the latest mobile development trends (Inconceivable!), Flutter is this really cool framework that Google “graciously” released a few years ago. In reality Google was tired of people releasing all the cool apps for iOS first, and they decided to make a cross platform toolkit so that at the very least, if they can’t get devs to code for Android first, they would get them to code for both platforms at the same time. Well, what can I say, it worked, they…
