IPC in Aether

Anyone who's ever dealt with unmanaged memory across multiple managed processes will know that it becomes very cumbersome to handle, especially when some of your code is single-threaded and some is multi-threaded. The hardest part is to synchronise the access of data. A mutex on a memory section can often be the best choice, since it works across the whole system. Unfortunately this solves but a single problem in a sea of glitches and issues. As such, the IPC in Aether has been transformed to use UDP packets instead.

Since UDP is a network protocol, one might assume that the packets would be sent across the network. If this were the case, it could open us up to significant security issues. As it turns out though, it doesn't end up being a problem. If any IPv4 packet is sent to localhost (127.0.0.1) the packet is intercepted by the socket provider and immediately copied back into the input buffer and dropped from the output buffer before it is sent to the hardware.

Since the .NET framework allows for simple access to the UDP protocol through the UdpClient class, it is relatively simple to combine asynchronous UDP sockets with a binary serialization class (BinaryFormatter) and wrapper classes to produce very reliable event-driven IPC.