lazywave

Lazywave is a term used in programming to describe an approach or library that combines lazy evaluation with streaming data to produce on-demand, potentially unbounded sequences of values. In this model, individual elements are not computed until they are consumed, and the consumption process propagates backpressure to the producer to avoid overwhelming the downstream components. The concept emphasizes composability, allowing simple transformations to be chained into more complex data pipelines without materializing entire collections in memory.

Typical architectures define the producer of a wave, a set of operators that transform or filter elements, and a sink that consumes results. Implementations often expose an interface for pulling values or subscribing to a stream, while maintaining minimal memory usage through lazy wrappers and short-circuiting when errors occur or when downstream demand is exhausted. Some designs integrate with existing streaming or reactive frameworks, adding lazy semantics as a layer atop eager data sources.

Common use cases include processing very large or infinite datasets, progressive rendering of UI lists, and real-time data feeds where latency and memory efficiency matter. Lazywave aims to balance responsiveness with predictability by ensuring that expensive computations run only when necessary and can be canceled if consumer demand drops.

Limitations include potential complexity, harder debugging, and subtle semantics around side effects. Implementations must carefully manage resource lifecycles and error propagation to avoid leaks and inconsistent states. Some programmers prefer more explicit lazy collections or standard reactive streams, depending on the domain and language ecosystem.

See also: lazy evaluation, streams, reactive programming, backpressure, on-demand computation.