Summary
We've made some fantastic progress on the application in this chapter. We not only made it actually useable by supporting terminal-based IO, but also made it even more flexible than it was before by allowing any IO to be used. We also drastically improved the efficiency of our transformation logic by streaming the conversion. Finally, we learned a little about the blocking nature of IO, setting the stage for the next chapter.
IO is a core piece of any application that is reading/writing data. Having the knowledge to know when to use it and, more importantly, how to take advantage of how to use it will ultimately lead to more efficient programs. This chapter also touched on the point of proper application design introduced in the last chapter, by giving some examples of how small changes can go a long way in improving the overall usefulness of an application.
In the next chapter, we are going to explore the concept of concurrency and how it can allow our application...