Chapter 13

1. Name two different modes associated with "classic" streams. Why are they problematic?

The two modes are push and pull. Push is problematic in the case of a slow consumer because it can lead to dropped stream elements or memory overflow. Pull is suboptimal in the case of a slow producer because it can lead to blocking or extensive resource consumption.

2. Why are Reactive Streams considered to work in dynamic pull-push mode?

Reactive Streams introduce the notion of non-blocking back pressure. The consumer reports the demand it has and the producer pushes data in batches according to this demand. When the consumer is faster, the demand is always there so the producer is always pushing data as soon as it is available. If there is a producer which is faster, there is always data available and the consumer just pulls it as soon as it has some demand. The flow...