Since the reason for the 'waiting till the one with the right order to come in' behaviour is the use of ^pid, presumably you could get rid of mailbox scanning t

Since the reason for the 'waiting till the one with the right order to come in' behaviour is the use of ^pid, presumably you could get rid of mailbox scanning time by getting rid of the caret (matching any message), so the mailbox never has >1 message. This means you get results filling up the array in the order they come rather than the original order, but if order's important, you can always pass around an index and sort by that after the fact.