simple-concat

This package is refreshingly simple - it takes a readable stream and concatenates all the data into a single Buffer or string. The API is literally one function that accepts a stream and a callback. You can learn everything about it in 30 seconds by looking at the tiny source code. I've used it in several CLI tools and data processing scripts where I needed to collect stream data without the overhead of concat-stream.

The learning curve is minimal if you already understand Node streams, but the README is extremely bare-bones. There are only two basic examples showing Buffer and string usage. Error handling isn't explicitly documented - you need to realize that stream errors won't be caught unless you attach an error listener yourself. This caught me off guard initially.

Debugging is straightforward since there's almost no code to debug. When things go wrong, it's usually your stream that's the problem, not simple-concat. The package has no dependencies, which means zero supply chain concerns and nothing breaks when you upgrade Node versions.

simple-concat does exactly what it says: collects stream chunks into a single buffer with minimal code. The API is dead simple - pass a readable stream and get a callback with the concatenated result. However, this simplicity comes at a cost for production environments.

The biggest operational concern is the complete lack of memory safeguards. There's no max buffer size, no backpressure handling, and no timeout mechanism. In production, this means a slow or malicious client can easily cause memory exhaustion by sending data indefinitely. You get zero observability into how much memory is being consumed until your process crashes.

For small, trusted inputs where you control the source, it's fine. But for any user-facing service or scenarios with untrusted data, you need to wrap this with your own timeouts and size checks, which defeats the purpose of using a minimal library. The error handling is basic - errors propagate to the callback, but there's no retry logic or resource cleanup hooks.

This package does exactly one thing: concatenates stream chunks into a single buffer or string. The implementation is truly minimal—just a callback-based wrapper that collects data events. In production, it's reliable for simple stream-to-buffer conversions where you control the input size.

The critical caveat is memory management: there's zero protection against unbounded streams. You must enforce size limits upstream or risk OOM crashes. No timeout handling, no max size parameter, no backpressure—it just accumulates everything. For trusted, bounded streams (parsing small config files, handling API responses with size limits elsewhere), it works perfectly with negligible overhead.

Error handling is basic but functional—errors are passed to your callback. No retry logic or configurability, which is fine given its scope. The lack of TypeScript definitions in older projects can be annoying, though @types/simple-concat exists. For production APIs handling user uploads or external streams, you'll want concat-stream or custom logic with size guards.