Difference between Java 8 streams and RxJava observables

Question

Are Java 8 streams similar to RxJava observables?

Java 8 stream definition:

Classes in the new java.util.stream package provide a Stream API to support functional-style operations on streams of elements.

Answer 1

Short answer

All sequence/stream processing libs are offering very similar API for pipeline building. The differences are in API for handling multi-threading and composition of pipelines.

Long answer

RxJava is quite different from Stream. Of all JDK things, the closest to rx.Observable is perhaps java.util.stream.Collector Stream + CompletableFuture combo (which comes at a cost of dealing with extra monad layer, i. e. having to handle conversion between Stream<CompletableFuture<T>> and CompletableFuture<Stream<T>>).

There are significant differences between Observable and Stream:

• Streams are pull-based, Observables are push-based. This may sound too abstract, but it has significant consequences that are very concrete.
• Stream can only be used once, Observable can be subscribed to many times.
• Stream#parallel() splits sequence into partitions, Observable#subscribeOn() and Observable#observeOn() do not; it is tricky to emulate Stream#parallel() behavior with Observable, it once had .parallel() method but this method caused so much confusion that .parallel() support was moved to separate repository: ReactiveX/RxJavaParallel: Experimental Parallel Extensions for RxJava. More details are in another answer.
• Stream#parallel() does not allow to specify a thread pool to use, unlike most of RxJava methods accepting optional Scheduler. Since all stream instances in a JVM use the same fork-join pool, adding .parallel() can accidentally affect the behaviour in another module of your program.
• Streams are lacking time-related operations like Observable#interval(), Observable#window() and many others; this is mostly because Streams are pull-based, and upstream has no control on when to emit next element downstream.
• Streams offer restricted set of operations in comparison with RxJava. E.g. Streams are lacking cut-off operations (takeWhile(), takeUntil()); workaround using Stream#anyMatch() is limited: it is terminal operation, so you can't use it more than once per stream
• As of JDK 8, there's no Stream#zip() operation, which is quite useful sometimes.
• Streams are hard to construct by yourself, Observable can be constructed by many ways EDIT: As noted in comments, there are ways to construct Stream. However, since there's no non-terminal short-circuiting, you can't e. g. easily generate Stream of lines in file (JDK provides Files#lines() and BufferedReader#lines() out of the box though, and other similar scenarios can be managed by constructing Stream from Iterator).
• Observable offers resource management facility (Observable#using()); you can wrap IO stream or mutex with it and be sure that the user will not forget to free the resource - it will be disposed automatically on subscription termination; Stream has onClose(Runnable) method, but you have to call it manually or via try-with-resources. E. g. you have to keep in mind that Files#lines() must be enclosed in try-with-resources block.
• Observables are synchronized all the way through (I didn't actually check whether the same is true for Streams). This spares you from thinking whether basic operations are thread-safe (the answer is always 'yes', unless there's a bug), but the concurrency-related overhead will be there, no matter if your code need it or not.

Round-up

RxJava differs from Streams significantly. Real RxJava alternatives are other implementations of ReactiveStreams, e. g. relevant part of Akka.

Update

There's trick to use non-default fork-join pool for Stream#parallel, see Custom thread pool in Java 8 parallel stream.

Update

All of the above is based on the experience with RxJava 1.x. Now that RxJava 2.x is here, this answer may be out-of-date.