Yes, there is exactly what you are looking for: Yield. http://yield.sf.net/ http://yield.sf.net/ It is an event-driven, staged (threads communicating via mess

Yes, there is exactly what you are looking for: Yield. http://yield.sf.net/ http://yield.sf.net/ It is an event-driven, staged (threads communicating via message passing) application server, written in C++. It has stages for HTTP server and client, disk IO, gzip, logging (basically all CPU-intensive or IO tasks). Messages between stages are defined in IDL. You can send those over the network via Sun-RPC or JSON-RPC. Not directly related to your request, but still handy: it also has a stage that wraps the Python VM, so you can write parts of your app in Python.