IPC from an addon

I am wondering if there's a way of doing IPC from an addon without unlocking LUA, which I reckon is detected by Warden.

I know you can't write to files and you can't make http requests. I know some people paint coloured stuff on the screen and then read it from other process, but that looks way overkill and I want to avoid it if possible.

Any ideas? Thanks.

The only simple way to do it without breaking any rules is using saved variables file to read data using another program after logout/reload and writing a file in the addons folder to pass data to the addon. That's how addons like TradeSkillMaster do it. If you want to do it real-time, colored squares are the best option. I don't know what you are planning to do but maybe realtime processing can be done by an addon instead of external program and then results can be read by an external program after you log out if needed?

Unfortunately, I need it to be in real time. And yes I know about colour coding stuff, but that requires me to write something to encode and something to decode, not too hard to do, but still a lot of work for what basically is some gimmick I want to do.

I had also thought of having a process attach to WoW and read the process memory, but that's also too much work (not sure if Warden cares about that though).

Another overkill idea (I haven't tried it, just frying my brain over this):

1. From outside WoW, monitor files being open by WoW.exe using something similar to ProcMon.

2. From inside WoW, use SetTexture to open files: if I want to send the string "potato", use tex:SetTexture("potato.tga"). WoW.exe will try to open it and will fail, but ProcMon will catch the failed open() call.

My idea was indeed too clever to work. Blizzard caches all textures in the addon directory and won't even try to open one that didn't exist when the addon was loaded.

In the end the squares ideas was the best one, even if it's very annoying to implement and probably very fragile.

https://i.imgur.com/3lrKbuC.png

Thanks!