Action Streams

[aretrace]

Summary

Have actions be able to return streams.

Background & Motivation

I like streams 😁

Goals

• You can only return serialized JSON, this is too limiting for todays applications. Enabling different modes follows the philosophy of actions; currently we have two input (accept) modes, 'json' (implicit) and 'form' (explicit). Having mirror parameters for action outputs (e.g., { remit: 'stream' }) would be very useful.

Example 🐺

defineAction({
  accept: '...',
  remit: 'stream',
  handler: async function* (input, ctx) {
    ...
    yield ...
    ...
  }
})

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 some inspiration
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[delucis]

Interesting. Could you share an example use case or two? When might you need to stream the result back?

[aretrace]

In essence, any scenario where a series of data is incrementally supplied, possibly without a defined endpoint.

Examples include:

• Real-time updates
• Progress indicators
• Instant messaging
• Monitoring and logging
• IoT and sensor data
• Notifications

Right now a popular use case would be relaying LLM response streams.
The participants of facebook/react-native#27741 could also explain why it's beneficial to stream a return.

[aretrace]

👇 Underlying Implementation Ideas 👇

i.e., http 1.1 chunked transfer encoding, server-sent events, application/octet-stream, etc...