For example, synchronous bitstreams are carried by SONET, and Transmission Control Protocol transports an asynchronous bytestream.
[citation needed] The term bitstream is frequently used to describe the configuration data to be loaded into a field-programmable gate array (FPGA).
On most operating systems, including Unix-like and Windows, standard I/O libraries convert lower-level paged or buffered file access to a bytestream paradigm.
Compression algorithms often code in bitstreams, as the 8 bits offered by a byte (the smallest addressable unit of memory) may be wasteful.
When bytes are generated faster than the destination can use them and the producer is a software algorithm, the system pauses it with the same process synchronization techniques.