Question

I’ve got a project that consists of two processes and I need to pass some data between them in a fast and efficent manner.

I’m aware that I could use sockets to do this using TCP, even though both processes will always exist on the same computer, however this does not seem to be a very efficient solution.

I see lots of information about using “pipes” on Linux. However I primarily want this for Windows and Linux (preferably via a cross platform library), ideally in a type safe,
non-blocking manner.

Another important thing is I need to support multiple instances of the whole application (i.e. both processes), each with their own independent copy of the communication objects.

Also is there a cross platform way to spawn a new process?

Answer 1

For IPC, Windows supports named pipes just like Linux does, except that the pipe names follow a different format, owing to the difference in path formats between the two operating systems. This is something that you could overcome with simple preprocessor defines. Both operating systems also support non-blocking IO on pipes and IO multiplexing with select().