async-transforms

Asynchronous stream transforms for Node. Allows async handlers and parallel execution, useful for build systems like Gulp and friends.

Install

Install async-transforms with your favourite package manager.

Usage

Use transforms.map, .filter or .gate to generate a stream.Transform instance that calls the passed handler.

// for example

import * as transforms from 'async-transforms';
import 'stream';

stream.pipeline(
  stream.Readable.from([object1, object2]),  // used for demo
  transforms.map(async (object) => {
    await object.expensiveOperation;
    await object.someOtherThing;
  }),
  createOutputStream('./foo'),
  (err) => {
    // callback
  },
)

These transforms operate in parallel and don't guarantee the order of their output (whatever finishes first). You can set options to configure behavior:

const s = transforms.map(handler, {
  order: true,  // force the same output order
  tasks: 5,     // limits number of parallel tasks
});

It's also possible to set objectMode: false (it's true by default) but this is unlikely to be useful to you.

Gulp

This example uses async-transforms to parallelize rendering with Less. This is important if e.g., Less is loading further files from the filesystem.

const transforms = require('async-transforms');
const {src, dest} = require('gulp');
const less = require('less');

exports.default = () => {
  return src('*.less')
    .pipe(transforms.map(async (file) => {
      const result = await less.render(file.contents.toString('utf8'));
      file.contents = Buffer.from(result.css);
      file.extname = '.css';
    }))
    .pipe(dest('output'));
};

While Gulp plugins for Less already exist, this makes it easier to write general-purpose, modern plugins with async and await syntax.

Worker Pool

This includes a submodule which provides a worker pool. It's useful when combined with the above transforms handler. For example:

import {pool} from 'async-transforms/worker';

const asyncCompile = pool(path.resolve('./compile.js'), {tasks: 2});

// use directly
const result = await asyncCompile('input', 'all', 'args', 'are', 'passed');

// or as part of a transform
stream.Readable.from([object1, object2])
    .pipe(transforms.map(asyncCompile))
    .pipe(transforms.map(() => {
      // do something with the result
    }));

The pool invokes the default export (or module.exports for CJS) of the target file. By default, it creates a maximum number of workers equal to 75% of your local CPUs, but set tasks to control this—use a fraction from 0-1 to set a ratio, and higher integers for an absolute number.

You can also specify minTasks to always keep a number of hot workers around. This number can only be an integer, and defaults to 1.

Use this for CPU-bound tasks like JS minification.

This doesn't really belong in this module.