# Module Bi_stream

    module Bi_stream: sig .. end

Streaming utilities (experimental)

This module offers a streaming interface for representing long lists of elements that cannot fit in memory. Stream items are serialized as chunks of configurable length.

Stream format (independent from the biniou serialization format):

      ( ONE INT64 BYTE* )* ZERO

where `INT64` is the length of a chunk (unsigned big-endian 64-bit int), i.e. the number of following `BYTE`s. `ONE` and `ZERO` are the single-byte representations of 1 and 0 and are used to indicate whether the end of the stream is reached.

    val read_stream : (string -> 'a array) -> Stdlib.in_channel -> 'a Stream.t

`read_stream of_string ic` creates an OCaml stream from an input channel `ic`. The data come in chunks and each chunk is converted from a string to an array by calling `of_string`.

    val write_stream : ?chunk_len:int ->
           ('a array -> string) -> Stdlib.out_channel -> 'a Stream.t -> unit

`write_stream to_string oc st` writes an OCaml stream to the output channel `oc`. It creates chunks of `chunk_len`, except for the last chunk which is usually smaller.

`chunk_len` : has a default value of 1024. The limit supported by this OCaml implementation on 32-bit platforms is 16777215.