[DonHopkins]

Not binary streams of serialized objects, but arrays of pointers to live objects in one process's memory. No serialization / deserialization, binary or text, or piping between processes, just passing pointers to live objects between cmdlets in the same address space. That's quite different and vastly more efficient than serializing and deserializing text or binary data between every step in different processes connected by pipes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerShell#Pipeline

>As with Unix pipelines, PowerShell pipelines can construct complex commands, using the | operator to connect stages. However, the PowerShell pipeline differs from Unix pipelines in that stages execute within the PowerShell runtime rather than as a set of processes coordinated by the operating system. Additionally, structured .NET objects, rather than byte streams, are passed from one stage to the next. Using objects and executing stages within the PowerShell runtime eliminates the need to serialize data structures, or to extract them by explicitly parsing text output. An object can also encapsulate certain functions that work on the contained data, which become available to the recipient command for use. For the last cmdlet in a pipeline, PowerShell automatically pipes its output object to the Out-Default cmdlet, which transforms the objects into a stream of format objects and then renders those to the screen.