Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

14.8. Message passing in programming languages

So far we have concentrated on the implementation and interface of the message passing system rather than on a high-level language view of message passing.

Software that is to run in a single address space is likely to be developed as separate modules and to require linking, often into a single load module. The linking phase involves type checking of the parameters for inter-module calls. When processes execute in a single address space their presence and interactions need not be visible at linking and loading time since the data passed between processes is type-checked as part of the normal module linkage procedure. In shared-memory systems, this data is just procedure call arguments.

In a system ...