popen equivalent in XPCOM?

Question

I'm trying to use XULRunner to add a GUI to a command line based program. One solution would be to use something like popen from the XUL application to interact with the command line program. Does XPCOM have popen? Alternatively, does XPCOM have enough primitives to create popen? Is there another approach that gives access to the standard in/out of a process?

PyXPCOM appears to have this capability, but I'd rather not add a dependency if possible.

Answer 1

Not in pure JS, no. It's possible to create a binary XPCOM component and in fact someone did that - see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68702.