Message Passing and Remote Procedure Call APIs

Distributed objects, Apple events, and other similar technologies are good solutions when you need to receive a response to indicate that the client has received a state change notification. This section briefly describes these technologies and provides pointers to further documentation.

Memory Mapping and Shared Memory

Memory mapping and other shared memory techniques provide a good way to move large quantities of data between two applications. When two applications need to move data on a continuous basis, polling can be more efficient than notifications. For example, two audio applications connected by a buffer would be a poor match for notifications because the receiving application must read data on a regular basis even in the absence of a notification.

OS X provides several ways to share memory, depending on your needs.

For audio, you should use the Audio Queue API (part of the Core Audio framework). This API is described in Audio Queue Services Programming Guide and Audio Queue Services Reference.

For general memory sharing, the easiest mechanism to use is the mmap(2) system call. This system call allows you to map a file or portion thereof into the memory space of your process, effectively giving you a read-only or read-write pointer into the contents of the file itself. By mapping a file simultaneously into multiple processes, you can easily create shared memory between these processes. (Note that before calling this system call, you must first create the file, then extend it to an appropriate size.)

Two other ways to share memory are the POSIX and System V shared memory APIs. Because the POSIX shared memory API is newer and more flexible, you should favor the POSIX shared memory API for new applications unless you need to support other computing platforms where it are not available.

You can learn more about POSIX shared memory in the shm_open(2) and shm_unlink(2) manual pages.

You can learn more about System V shared memory in the shmat(2), shmctl(2), shmget(2), and shmdt(2) manual pages.

You can learn how to memory map files in the mmap(2) manual page. To find a simple example of this technique, see Cross-Architecture Plug-in Support in 64-Bit Transition Guide.