Create and communicate with a non-terminating shell via child_process in nodejs - node.js

Question

Is there a way to spawn a single child_process in NodeJS and pass it various commands over time keeping the same process open as long as necessary? Sort of like a spawned terminal which accepts commands from Node.
Why? Performance.
I have a NodeJS/Electron application which should execute powershell commands and this is achieved using Node's child_process module. However the performance is not great: there appears to be a couple of seconds overhead each time I spawn a child process (which is to be expected I suppose).
This means that commands such as Get-Date take 600ms instead of a few (2) milliseconds. Other commands take 2+ seconds instead of say 800ms.
Desired workflow:
Start a child powershell process (exec with shell = powershell)
Pass it a command
Get the results (stdout/stderr)
Wait seconds to minutes for the user...
Pass it a second command
Get the results (stdout/stderr)
etc...
Close child process
I have considered writing powershell commands from NodeJS to a file commands.txt. Next I would start a single powershell child_process which watches/tails a file for new commands and executes them, passing the output into another file which the parent (NodeJS) process watches. This seems a bit hacky however...

Answer 1

I have found one solution using spawn and periodically piping input to the process with stdin.write:
const { spawn } = require("child_process");
const ps1 = spawn("C:\\Windows\\SysWOW64\\WindowsPowerShell\\v1.0\\powershell.exe", [], {});
console.log("PID", ps1.pid, "started");
ps1.stdout.on('data', (data)=>{
console.log("STDOUT:"+data);
});
ps1.stderr.on('data', (data)=>{
console.log("STDERR:"+data);
});
ps1.on('close', (code, signal) => {
console.log(`child process terminated due to receipt of signal ${signal}`);
});
setInterval(()=>{
ps1.stdin.write("Get-Date\n");
}, 1000);
Results:
PID 7688 started
STDOUT:Windows PowerShell
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
STDOUT:PS W:\powershell\powowshell\bak>
STDOUT:Get-Date
STDOUT:
STDOUT:Freitag, 17. Mai 2019 17:55:52
STDOUT:
STDOUT:PS W:\powershell\powowshell\bak>
STDOUT:Get-Date
STDOUT:
STDOUT:Freitag, 17. Mai 2019 17:55:53
So now it's "just" a case of stripping whitespace and other fuzz and getting the results.