> It could just pass references to memory addresses of the object How? They're different processes running in different threads. If it's raw binary data then i

> It could just pass references to memory addresses of the object How? They're different processes running in different threads. If it's raw binary data then it has to at least be copied, which will often be a lot less efficient than just copying text. You can't just memcpy complex .net objects though. There's nothing stopping unix programs from piping raw binary data, it's just not generally done because it's usually a bad idea.