[malone]

Streams are nice but in my experience there aren't many modules that let you use them. Most networking protocol modules will only let you specify a hostname and port to connect to, and not pass a stream to use. That's fine for the common case, but maybe I want to do something fun like send data encrypted with ssl, which is encoded using base 64, then stuffed in a dns query, then tunnelled over socks, via a unix pipe (and receive the reply via a completely different stack). It wouldn't be hard to chain streams together to achieve that, but then I'd have to rewrite modules to actually use it.

Even nodes own http module only does standard tcp. If it supported arbitrary streams then it'd be much more flexible, and we wouldn't need to do things like use a separate module to support https.

The same with the server part of these modules. They normally only let you specify a tcp port to listen to. Ideally there should be some sort of "stream server" interface that automatically sets up the stream chain and emits a connection event. The module could then listen for that event and use the corresponding stream for transferring the data. That way the module would be completely independent of the underlying protocol.

[grncdr]

LuaSocket's ltn12 module might interest you:

http://w3.impa.br/~diego/software/luasocket/ltn12.html