[Lukasa]

It turns out TLS isn't that bad.

OpenSSL exposes a "memory BIO", which is basically exactly this. You send in writes, and then emit data when you can, and in the meantime it buffers.

It's a bit more limited than that, but generally speaking it's not too bad.

[JoshTriplett]

I assume you handle decompression the same way? Feed in data, and the decompressor emits data when it can?