[luatex] IPC best practices?

[Patrick Gundlach]

Hi all,

I have a bit of a vague question about inter process communication. The setup is a program written in Go (but that should not matter very much) that starts one LuaTeX process as a child. Supported systems are Linux, Windows and Mac. Now I would like to talk between the parent process (Go) and the child process (LuaTeX) such as:

  parent: "Hello child, please do this"
  child: "hi parent, I have done this, here is the result"

and so on.

What is the cleanest way to do this? I used to do that over TCP sockets (talking on a defined port on the local host), but this does not seem as the optimal solution. For example on Windows I get a "firewall warning" that the user has to click away.

Any idea on that topic?

Patrick