https://github.com/xi-editor is an example of the architecture you're referring to I believe. Xi's README makes it clear that very high performance is one of the main goals: in particular it mentions the latency between keypresses and screen painting. To what extent does this RPC-based architecture limit performance compared to a single-process architecture? I know that the original author of Xi very much knows what he is doing, so I guess the answer is "it doesn't" -- I was just hoping to be educated on this point.