Idle once used os.spawnv to open the user subprocess and 2.7 still does. Sockets were then used to interact with the subprocess. Since rev71746, 2011-8-3, 3.2+ use subprocess.Popen but still use sockets. A rare but continual problem is failure to make the socket connection.

In #16123, Amaury Forgeot d'Arc suggested "pipes?" The idea resurfaced again in current Idle-sig thread "Idle does not open on mac" (because socket connection timed out). Guido, who designed the current 2.x system, chimed in with "I would recommend trying to use the subprocess module."

A current python-list thread indicates that there can be problems with
"Running a command line program and reading the result as it runs"
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2013-August/654265.html

In particular, "for line in p:" gets lines delayed (buffered) while
Peter Otten discovered that "for line in iter(p.stdout.readline, ''):" gets them as they are produced.
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2013-August/654330.html

We first need to experiment running a simple echo server with python(w).exe.  I have not succeeded yet on Windows.