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A collection of converters between various Scala streaming libraries

Did you ever find yourself with a stream from one streaming library, but some other part of your program expects a stream from some other library? Do you want to provide streaming as part of your API, don't want to limit yourself to a single streaming library? stream-adapter provides tooling to help address both of these situations.

Converting between two streaming libraries

stream-adapter provides conversions between the following Scala streaming libraries:

More can be added relatively easily, as we will see below. Let's start with an Akka Source:

import akka.actor.ActorSystem
import akka.stream.ActorMaterializer
import akka.stream.scaladsl.Source
implicit val actorSystem = ActorSystem("streamadapter")
implicit val materializer = ActorMaterializer()
val akkaSource = Source(0.until(10))

We can convert this to an fs2.Stream like so:

val fs2Stream: fs2.Stream[cats.effect.IO, Int] = {
  import streamadapter._
  import streamadapter.akka._
  import streamadapter.fs2._
  adapt[AkkaSource, FS2Stream, Int](akkaSource)
}

Converting streams requires a small handful of wildcard imports. I like to put these in an anonymous block, as above, so they don't apply to the rest of the code in the file.

Unfortunately, the effects for fs2.Stream is hardwired to fs2.Task for the moment. We should be able to handle other effects in the future.

Let's now convert that FS2 stream into an io.iteratee.Enumerator:

val iterateeIoEnumerator: io.iteratee.Enumerator[cats.Eval, Int] = {
  import scala.concurrent.ExecutionContext.Implicits.global
  import streamadapter._
  import streamadapter.fs2._
  import streamadapter.iterateeio._
  adapt[FS2Stream, EvalEnumerator, Int](fs2Stream)
}

All three of the type arguments to adapt should be inferrable by the compiler. The first and the third argument are inferrable from the argument, fs2Stream, and the second argument should be inferrable from the left-hand side. But I haven't figured out how to get the compiler to infer any of them yet. Can you help? It's not as simple as you might think, because the implicit resolution has to navigate between types with two type parameters, such as Enumerator[Eval, Int], and types with a single type parameter, such as streamadapter.iterateeio.EvalEnumerator[Int].

Let's in turn convert this iteratee.io enumerator into a Play enumerator:

val playEnumerator: play.api.libs.iteratee.Enumerator[Int] = {
  import streamadapter._
  import streamadapter.iterateeio._
  import streamadapter.play._
  import scala.concurrent.ExecutionContext.Implicits.global
  adapt[EvalEnumerator, PlayEnumerator, Int](iterateeIoEnumerator)
}

All four enumerators above will produce the same elements, zero through nine, as you can see for yourself by running Usage.scala.

How it works

The stream-adapter provides a class Chunkerator that captures most of the functionality of a stream in a synchronous data structure. Streams are re-runnable, so we provide a Function0 that produces an iterator:

trait Chunkerator[+A] extends Function0[CloseableChunkIter[A]] { // ...

The CloseableChunkIter is an iterator over "chunks", which are used by various streaming libraries for performance reasons:

trait CloseableChunkIter[+A] extends CloseableIter[Seq[A]]

A CloseableIter is just an iterator that supports a close operation, so the consumer can communicate to the producer that it finished early, allowing the producer to free up resources:

trait CloseableIter[+A] extends Iterator[A] {
  def close: Unit
}

For each streaming library, we provide two adapters: one from a Chunkerator to a stream, and the other from a stream to a Chunkerator. We can then combine two adapters to produce an adapter between any two streaming libraries, using Chunkerator as a mediator. This way, we can have eight converters - two for each of four streaming libraries - instead of the twelve we would need if we were going to provide custom adapters for every pair of streaming libraries. And if we add another streaming library to the mix, we only need to add two adapters, instead of eight.

One advantage to this approach is for people who are writing libraries that provide a streaming API, but don't want to lock it down to a single streaming library. In this case, they can just produce a single Chunkerator, and use stream-adapter to produce streams from multiple libraries. In fact, this is how I am using it. I only use the stream to Chunkerator converters for testing.

Of course, this approach does not rule out the possibility of providing custom adapters that remove the mediating step. We may have to juggle the implicits a bit to make this work, but it shouldn't be a big deal.

Limitations

This early release is very raw, and there are a number of improvements that could be made. I've created GitHub issues to keep track of all the ideas I've come up with. Rather than repeating myself here, I'll ask you to browse the issues yourself:

Usage

We provide artifacts for Scala 2.11 and 2.12. We don't have 2.10 artifacts because there is not a full suite of 2.10 artifacts for the four streaming libraries.

libraryDependencies += "org.longevityframework" %% "streamadapter" % "0.1.0"

All the underlying streaming libraries are included here as optional dependencies, so you will need to bring in the libraries you want in your own project. Examples:

libraryDependencies += "com.typesafe.akka" %% "akka-stream" % "2.5.2"

libraryDependencies += "co.fs2" %% "fs2-core" % "0.9.6"

libraryDependencies += "org.typelevel" %% "cats" % "0.9.0"
libraryDependencies += "io.iteratee" %% "iteratee-core" % "0.12.0"

libraryDependencies += "com.typesafe.play" %% "play-iteratees" % "2.6.1"

License

It's Apache 2. I don't really have any reasons to pick a different license than this seemingly de-facto open source license. If you have some good reasons why this project should be released under a different license, please let me know.