And lo, it came to pass, that contacts were approved.

And it was good.

ZeroMQ

Ahwulf sent me a link to an interesting little message-passing library, ZeroMQ (0MQ).  Lean, mean, frugal.

There are a host of language wrappers (C, C++, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, .NET etc) which makes it pretty handy for interop. A quick C++ example: