Another common thing you can do is accept a generic stream as input, but have some code that penetrates the abstraction a bit to see what kind of stream it is, and if it is a file or something, do something special with it to go even faster. This way, you start with something maximally useful up front, and easy to use, but you can optimize things based on details as you go.

That's how Go's static file web server works. It serves streams, but if you happen to io.Copy to that stream with something that is also an ∗os.File on Linux, it can use the sendfile call in the kernel instead. (A downside of making it so transparent is that if you wrap that stream with something you may not realize that you've wrecked the optimization because it no longer unwraps to an ∗os.File but whatever your wrapper is, but, well, nothing's perfect.)

Which is sorta-kinda the same thing as

  jq .field <(aws s3 cp s3://bucket/file.json.gz - | zcat | head) | sort

which is more annoying to type but works.