ayani

Indeed, there is no free lunch.

At is stands, this is only really workable for low traffic (so it doesn't eat memory) where connections do not come and go frequently (so it doesn't eat process management CPU).

Once you start doing multiplexing for the sake of making this more reasonable in terms of resource usage, the simplicity benefits kind of fall away as you move closer to a full concurrent web framework.

I guess it really depends what you're tuning for, what your use case is, and how much hardware budget you have to throw at the problem.

The .NET shell does this, but that's why it's not Unix, and it's not universal.

If programs passed data structures then either you're forcing a certain data structure model (i.e. it's not universal, because it's not compatible with anything else), or your data structures are so general (i.e. a block stream) that your applications are going to be parsing anyway... and that's going to be even nastier than if everything was stupid text steams in the first place.