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In contrast to protobuf2 there is no way in protobuf3 to mark some fields as optional and some other fields as required. Instead, any field might be omitted leading this field to be set to its default zero-value. I believe there were many good reasons for such a design decision. However, while this behavior might be superior to the proto2's explicit distinction between required and optional fields, it also has some unfortunate implications.

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Writable streams are an abstraction for a destination to which data is written... And this time it's a concise abstraction! Compared to vague readable streams (multiple operation modes behind single abstraction) writable streams implement only one mode and hence expose only one essential method write(chunk). Nevertheless, the idea of writable streams is not trivial and it's due to one nice feature it provides - backpressure. Let's try to wrap our mind around writable stream abstraction.

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Readable stream is an abstraction for some data source. Which could be hard to grasp and even harder to use...

Everybody knows that readable streams support two modes of operating (flowing and paused) and piping to writable streams. It's not that easy to understand the purposes of these mechanisms and behavioral differences though. Since one readable stream abstraction stands for multiple usage modes its public interface (i.e. the set of methods and events) is a bit inconsistent. Usage of readable streams might be totally confusing without the understanding of the underlying ideas. In this article, we will make an attempt to justify the abstraction of readable streams trying to implement our own file reader. Also, we will have a look at some nicer ways to consume readable streams.

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Do you want to run an executable file from your program? Or execute a shell command programmatically? Or maybe just parallelize your code? Have you read a lot of information regarding execve() functions family and fork() but still have a mess in your head? Then this article is for you.

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