I can suggest you to use the plibsys C library. It is very simple, lightweight and cross-platform. Released under the LGPL. It provides:
- named system-wide shared memory regions (System V, POSIX and Windows implementations);
- named system-wide semaphores for access synchronization (System V, POSIX and Windows implementations);
- named system-wide shared buffer implementation based on the shared memory and semaphore;
- sockets (TCP, UDP, SCTP) with IPv4 and IPv6 support (UNIX and Windows implementations).
It is easy to use library with quite a good documentation. As it is written in C you can easily make bindings from scripting languages.
If you need to pass large data sets between processes (especially if speed is essential) it is better to use shared memory to pass the data itself and sockets to notify a process that the data is ready. You can make it as following:
- a process puts the data into a shared memory segment and sends a notification via a socket to another process; as a notification usually is very small the time overhead is minimal;
- another process receives the notification and reads the data from the shared memory segment; after that it sends a notification that the data was read back to the first process so it can feed more data.
This approach can be implemented in a cross-platform fashion.
