This is strange asymmetry which is sometimes needed, e.g. for WebREPL: we
want to process only available input and no more; but for output, we want
to get rid of all of it, because there's no other place to buffer/store
it. This asymmetry is akin to CPython's asyncio asymmetry, where reads are
asynchronous, but writes are synchronous (asyncio doesn't expect them to
block, instead expects there to be (unlimited) buffering for any sync write
to completely immediately).