[zanny]

The way you word it, (and from my personal bias) it seems like people kicked the can on getting IPC right down the road. I like how plan9 handled it - one socket layer to rule them all, call into other programs over sockets, and let the filesystem handle the translations. I think in this modern era of extreme hardware juice, this could easily work. And work better than what we have.

Then again, I think shared memory is a harder problem to solve than using IPC through some buffered file metric. The synchronization becomes a pain in the butt, even if you manage a smidgen more performance out of the ordeal, it isn't very reusable, so it is only a situational tool. I feel like module injection a la Linux should have been a situational tool as well (at best), but we ended up putting everything in the kernel, and we keep adding more (KMS, KVM, DMI2, etc).