It takes a bit of imagination, but think about replacing shared libraries, plugins, and socket IPC with services that live in their own process with their own l

It takes a bit of imagination, but think about replacing shared libraries, plugins, and socket IPC with services that live in their own process with their own lifecycle and security sandbox, but can still be accessed efficiently. Apps can be built from many such services, and services can be shared between apps. There have been many attempts to build this sort of capability into mainstream operating systems, but none have become popular due to the inescapable complexity of IPC. A recent example is D-Bus, which is supposed to be "lite" yet still involves XML interface descriptions and serialization. It's enough of a hassle to implement that nobody bothers, unless it's the only option or they are evangelizing the technology. QNX is built from the ground up to do everything this way. If it makes IPC easy enough, it could bring this type of software architecture to critical mass. I realize this is still pretty vague, but I can't think of a specific example at the moment. If you're interested, read up on QNX, or Coyotos, which is a more experimental OS that is based fundamentally on IPC.