[cb321]

Sure. No problem.

While it may not be in any ANSI/ISO spec for C, even Windows has popen these days. There are also some tiny Nim popenr/popenw wrappers in https://github.com/c-blake/cligen/blob/master/cligen/osUt.ni... covering the Windows case.

Depending upon how balanced work is on either side of the pipe, you usually can even get parallel speed-up on multicore with almost no work. For example, there is no need to use quote-escaped CSV parsing libraries when you just read from a popen()d translator program producing an easier format: https://github.com/c-blake/nio/blob/main/utils/c2tsv.nim