Does Windows have a virtual or temporary filesystem natively?

Question

I have a closed source third party API that writes the output data to a file, however I want to read that data and want to process it further.

The API is a library in DLL and takes a regular file path like "C:\someFolder\someFile"

The current setup requires me to save the data from api to a temp file on the disk and then read this temp file to get the data into memory for processing.

Is it possible in windows to have a virtual file or filesystem in main memory with regular path so that the API can write to the main memory instead of disk which would make things faster as there would be no disk access.

Is this possible natively in windows without using any additional software or API installations?

Answer 1

You can create a named pipe and give the path in a form of \\.\pipe\PipeName to your DLL. Then in your own code connect to the pipe and read. See an example here: Create Named Pipe C++ Windows.