It's true that error handling with (shell) pipes is not possible in a clean way in general. In shell, the best you can do is probably "set -o pipefail", but tha

It's true that error handling with (shell) pipes is not possible in a clean way in general. In shell, the best you can do is probably "set -o pipefail", but that's only in bash. Concurrency with IO on both sides is really hard to get right even in theory. Text representation is a good idea regardless of whether you pipe or not.