[jstewartmobile]

I'm a big fan of the Mathematica-style console that mixes commands with media. Being able to embed surfaces that each command could communicate with would be fantastic. I believe Genera and Dr. Racket have similar features.

For short-lived processes, another stdio pipe pair may be sufficient (i.e. imgin/imgout). By image, not necessarily a raster. A byte buffer with a mime type would be more flexible (audio processing, etc.).

For long-lived processes, interactivity would be nice. Could have a communication protocol for keystrokes/mouse while the process is active. Or perhaps X or Wayland could be retrofitted into it some way where developers can kill two birds with one stone.

Keeping the alignment is worthwhile, so may want to round the surface size to some whole multiple of the character width/height.