We Ralph Wiggumed WebStreams to make them 10x faster
Feb 18, 2026

Summary
This post details the development of `fast-webstreams`, a library that reimplements WHATWG Streams using Node.js streams internally. It introduces optimizations for piping between streams (zero Promises per chunk, ~10x faster), chunk-by-chunk reading (synchronous resolution, ~3.7x faster), React Flight patterns (~14.6x faster), and fetch response bodies (~3.2x faster). The library passes 1100/1116 Web Platform Tests and is being deployed incrementally at Vercel, with contributions made upstream to Node.js.