While I agree with you in principle that IRC is underrated, it is not a real messaging system as is. First off, it is inherently synchronous, not asynchronous.

While I agree with you in principle that IRC is underrated, it is not a real messaging system as is. First off, it is inherently synchronous, not asynchronous. On top of that does it lack a bunch of core features, namely persistence, and delivery/ordering guarantees. The former can be worked around by implementing your actual pub/sub heavylifting in the form of irc-bots. But the latter is a killer that cannot be solved without significantly rearchitecting any existing ircd impl. Disclaimer: Yes, been there, done that. ;-) If you're interested in high performance messaging beyond AMQP then I suggest to take a look at the spread toolkit. It doesn't have persistence either but is pretty good otherwise.