> Recently I've been exploring the idea that small programs should consist of two parts; a "backend" that you can communicate with via a strict message protocol

> Recently I've been exploring the idea that small programs should consist of two parts; a "backend" that you can communicate with via a strict message protocol like protobuf. It can handle multiple requests because it is a mini server, the message format is locked to a "type" and you communicate with it via RPC. Well there was an implementation of something like that, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCE/RPC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCE/RPC or DCOM, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Component_Object_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Component_Object_M... then there was dcop, dbus, and a bunch of others and now nobody remembers what the goal was