Interacting between two different programs

[Anthony J Bonkoski]

On Saturday, 29 June 2013 at 06:08:28 UTC, Jeremy DeHaan wrote:
> I've been toying around with the idea of working on an IDE, 
> mostly because I think it would be an interesting/fun project 
> to work on. In any case, the only thing I cannot seem to wrap 
> my head around is how programs like Code Blocks and Visual 
> Studio, and various other IDE's interact with debuggers as if 
> it isn't some external thing.
>
> How does someone have one program interact with another like 
> this? Can you have one send its output to the other's input? Do 
> they somehow share the same IO's? I've never had to write code 
> that does anything like this so I'm you great minds out there 
> can shed some light.
>
> Thanks in advance!

At a more fundamental level, you might want to read about fork(), 
pipe(), execlp()  UNIX-style system calls. Here's a nice 
document: http://www.makelinux.net/alp/038. Given, this is 
Unix-specific and Windows will be much different. However, you'll 
find this low-level understanding useful when using the 
higher-level APIs.