thingswhile

Thingswhile is a term used in software development to describe an idiom for processing a stream of items, referred to as things, while a condition remains true. In practice, it combines a loop control structure with streaming or event-driven processing, allowing a system to continue handling inputs as long as it has work to do or until a stop signal is received. The phrase is informal and not tied to a single programming language or formal specification.

Origin and usage: The term emerged in online discussions, blogs, and code samples among developers working with data pipelines, sensors, and asynchronous workflows in the 2010s. It expresses the idea of driving work by ongoing availability of "things" rather than by static batch boundaries.

Concepts and patterns: Thingswhile emphasizes continuous processing, backpressure awareness, and resource management. Common implementations use a while loop that pulls the next item from a source (queue, stream, generator) and processes it, stopping when the source is exhausted or a termination condition is met. In modern frameworks, similar behavior appears in reactive streams, asynchronous iterators, or generator-based pipelines.

Example (pseudo-code): while more_things(source): t = next_thing(source); if should_stop(t): break; process(t).

Variants and related terms: The idea overlaps with streaming, data pipelines, event-driven programming, and the concept of a generator or consumer loop. It is sometimes conflated with any loop that processes items indefinitely until a condition breaks it.

See also: streaming, generators, reactive programming, while loop, backpressure.