Stream<T> class

A source of asynchronous data events.

A Stream provides a way to receive a sequence of events. Each event is either a data event, also called an element of the stream, or an error event, which is a notification that something has failed. When a stream has emitted all its event, a single "done" event will notify the listener that the end has been reached.

You listen on a stream to make it start generating events, and to set up listeners that receive the events. When you listen, you receive a StreamSubscription object which is the active object providing the events, and which can be used to stop listening again, or to temporarily pause events from the subscription.

There are two kinds of streams: "Single-subscription" streams and "broadcast" streams.

A single-subscription stream allows only a single listener during the whole lifetime of the stream. It doesn't start generating events until it has a listener, and it stops sending events when the listener is unsubscribed, even if the source of events could still provide more.

Listening twice on a single-subscription stream is not allowed, even after the first subscription has been canceled.

Single-subscription streams are generally used for streaming chunks of larger contiguous data like file I/O.

A broadcast stream allows any number of listeners, and it fires its events when they are ready, whether there are listeners or not.

Broadcast streams are used for independent events/observers.

If several listeners want to listen to a single subscription stream, use asBroadcastStream to create a broadcast stream on top of the non-broadcast stream.

On either kind of stream, stream transformations, such as where and skip, return the same type of stream as the one the method was called on, unless otherwise noted.

When an event is fired, the listener(s) at that time will receive the event. If a listener is added to a broadcast stream while an event is being fired, that listener will not receive the event currently being fired. If a listener is canceled, it immediately stops receiving events. Listening on a broadcast stream can be treated as listening on a new stream containing only the events that have not yet been emitted when the listen call occurs. For example, the first getter listens to the stream, then returns the first event that listener receives. This is not necessarily the first even emitted by the stream, but the first of the remaining events of the broadcast stream.

When the "done" event is fired, subscribers are unsubscribed before receiving the event. After the event has been sent, the stream has no subscribers. Adding new subscribers to a broadcast stream after this point is allowed, but they will just receive a new "done" event as soon as possible.

Stream subscriptions always respect "pause" requests. If necessary they need to buffer their input, but often, and preferably, they can simply request their input to pause too.

The default implementation of isBroadcast returns false. A broadcast stream inheriting from Stream must override isBroadcast to return true.