I hate complexity, and because of that I spent a lot of time creating the Redis modules subsystem so that I can take a very small core. However general data structures like streams
are, in my opinion, not bloating Redis, which is still, in the "streams" branch, at just 85k lines of code. For two reasons: 1) Data structures are self contained beasts in Redis, they do not interact with other features to
multiply complexity. Other features are instead like that, for instance expires interact with replication, AOF, scripting and so forth. 2) IMHO bloating Redis is to add too narrow use-case specific things insdie it. But as Redis has lists, hashes, sets, ... the "log" really was part of the general purpose things that Redis was lacking. As a result of this lack, people used something else adding complexity inside their code in order to model the same problem with a wrong tool, like sorted sets or lists or Pub/Sub, which are good for certain things but not for time series or certain events streaming tasks. Btw the fact that after around 8 years we are at 85k likes of code, totally understandable by a single individual in a matter of weeks, positions Redis as one of the simplest simple software projects out there.
Another data point, streams are if not completely, at least 70% done as we talk, and yet `git log --stat unstable..streams` reports:
12 files changed, 1323 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)
We'll end at 2000 lines of code I guess more or less. Just to say, Redis is at a complexity scale very far from many other things we are used to these days.