Necessity is the mother of pull requests, so that’s what I did.

As you may know, Node.js is the JavaScript web server. As such, one of the necessary features for it to have is a zlib compression and decompression module. That module is actually pretty neat. It features both a syncronous and an asyncronous API backed by native-code which makes it much more efficient than JavaScript-based alternative.

It the best option for handling zlib compression in Node.js… That is of course, unless it’s missing a feature.

I had need of a way to decompress multiple zlib streams that were concatenated together without any meta data to tell how long each stream was. This is trivial to do with the native C library, python, or pure-JS zlib ports. Unfortunately, the Node.js zlib API simply did not expose this information.

One option would be to just use a pure-JS zlib port like pako, but Node.js is open source. It would be better if we just fix the problem!

Searching through the bug tracker, I found an existing open issue, and after a brief discussion of what the API should look like, I created the pull requests.

Now with the release of Node.js 8.1, this information is available, and the bug is no more!

This is what makes open-source great!