Yup, pipe() is actually a great, minimal solution. POSIX guarantees PIPE_BUF to be at least 512 bytes, so you are guaranteed atomicity for any size pointer.

Yup, pipe() is actually a great, minimal solution. POSIX guarantees PIPE_BUF to be at least 512 bytes, so you are guaranteed atomicity for any size pointer. I think on Linux the unit of atomicity is 4096 bytes, which is a page. Yeah, there are a million ways to use C++. To be fair, most people have their architecture forced upon them, rather than creating it from scratch. And the C++ world does have a culture of spaghetti with shared mutable state and threads. In Erlang you have the opposite culture. So I can understand the association that people make with a language, even though it's more a matter of culture. In addition, C++ doesn't even have a thread safe queue in the STL (although I was pointed to a draft for one in the next version of C++ by a coworker). pipe() is a good solution I would use, but not portable to other OSes.