Inter-Process Communication
Inter-Process Communication (IPC) is a set of mechanisms that allow processes to communicate and synchronize their actions, enabling data exchange and coordination between separate programs or components running on the same or different systems. It is fundamental in operating systems and distributed computing for building modular, scalable applications. IPC methods include pipes, message queues, shared memory, sockets, and remote procedure calls.
Developers should learn IPC when building multi-process applications, microservices architectures, or systems requiring high performance and modularity, such as web servers, databases, or real-time data processing tools. It is essential for enabling communication between independent software components, facilitating load balancing, fault isolation, and parallel execution in modern computing environments.