I am making a small application that always uses tor to communicate. I have embedded tor into the application by compiling and linking the tor source code along with my own code and calling tor's main() from within my own main(). To send data, tor has to open a port on the machine and my application would have to send data to 127.0.0.1:port

This seems a little unnecessary since both tor and my application run in the same process. More importantly, it seems like any program on the machine can use my application's embedded tor client by connecting to the right port.

The easiest way to avoid opening a port seems to be to modify the socket implementation so that it accesses an array rather than sending/receiving data.

Are there any existing applications that embed tor in this manner? Is there a better way to do this, and if not, are there any corner cases I have to watch out for?