Executing an external process

[wasabi]

I'm starting on a small project with a friend of mine who works with perl. It's going to do some machinations on the internet and return some data to my C++ program. He's going to convert the perl code to an .exe so I've already looked up what to do and came up with _exec*() (on Windows). However, I've noticed that the return value of these functions is intptr_t.

1. What is intptr_t? I've looked around, but I can't really figure it out.

2. Is there a way for my friend's program to return the data directly to my program? Or will he have to output the data to a text-file which my program will then read?

[Moschops]

With the libperl++ library, you can embed the perl directly into your C++ code.

[wasabi]

libperl++ doesn't build in Windows due to perl linker problems.
"Building libperl++ on Windows currently doesn't work due to issues in Perl's linking toolchain. This is being worked on."

But it does look quite interesting. I'd bumped into it on my search, but didn't understand it well. I took another look at it and it does indeed look useful.

However, the problem is a pretty grievous problem since we use Windows. *grumble*