Spawning a console in Windows (similar to forkpty on linux)

[Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Saturday, 9 May 2015 at 13:00:01 UTC, wobbles wrote:
> On Linux, I'm able to edit a file descriptor after I've created 
> it to tell it to read/write asynchronously, I cant seem to find 
> anything similar on windows however.

Asynchronous I/O on Windows is called "Overlapped I/O". It is a 
bit involved to use though, especially since D by default doesn't 
come with all the necessary headers. You can download the win32 
api bindings or you can just declare the bits as needed.

My terminal emulator uses overlapped I/O and a spawned process 
(and on Linux, it uses forkpty!) to talk to ssh on Windows.

https://github.com/adamdruppe/terminal-emulator/blob/master/terminalemulator.d

I had to write a function to make an async pipe, then spawn a 
process using them, then get and send data. I also declared all 
the needed functions myself.

A lot of code to go through but it is a working example... a few 
things to look for are MyCreatePipeEx, CreateProcess, the word 
'overlapped', ReadFileEx, and the simpledisplay.d library it 
imports also uses SleepEx which lets other things trigger.