Hello!

I am currently working on a Rust-based static site generator. As such, to add support for Tailwind, I'm spawning the CLI with the arguments I need and stuff. This is good and fine, however the overhead of spawning a Node process is absolutely insane compared to how long my builds are generally taking. It's faster for my SSG to generate thousands of pages than starting a Node process. In most cases Tailwind takes 99% of the build time of projects using my SSG.

To remediate this, I implemented a system where I call Tailwind CLI in the background waiting for stdin and whenever I need it, I send some stuff through, get the stdout, etc.

This works but it's very clumsy for multiple reasons:

• Tailwind closes after receiving something, so it's not possible to process multiple files using the same process
• There's no way to specify the path of the file since I'm using stdin, as such resolving imports is complicated and require spawning a new process in different cwds for every asset in different folders anyway.

What I'd like to see is a way to run the CLI as a permanent process and being able to send it messages through stdin. Could be JSON or some other format, something like:

{"input": "some-file", "minify": false, "map": true}

Then the CLI would output something to stdout with the result (if no output is specified, then the content would be included in said result, otherwise something like {"status": "done"} or something. I'd be willing to help implement this if the idea is accepted.