This is a collection of some ideas on how Boost.Process could be improved in the future.

Communicate with a parent process

While it's rather easy to communicate with a child process through the child class Boost.Process could provide a parent class to make it as easy to communicate with a parent process. This would be especially helpful to easily support asynchronous I/O as the standard streams only support blocking I/O operations.

Here's how such a program could look like:

boost::asio::io_service ioservice; 

void handler(const boost::system::error_code &ec) 
{ 
} 

int main() 
{ 
    boost::process::parent p; 
    boost::process::pipe write_end(ioservice, p.get_handle(boost::process::stdin_id).release()); 
    boost::asio::async_write(write_end, boost::asio::buffer("Hello, world!"), handler); 
    ioservice.run(); 
} 

Create a snapshot of system processes

As of today Boost.Process is most useful when creating and managing child processes. Boost.Process could provide a free-standing function create_snapshot though to create a snapshot of all system processes.

int main() 
{ 
    std::vector<boost::process::process> processes; 
    boost::process::create_snapshot(std::back_inserter(processes)); 
    boost::process::process p = processes.front(); 
    int exit_code = p.wait(); 
}