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In computer science, message passing is a form of communication used in concurrent programming, parallel programming, object-oriented programming, and interprocess communication. Communication is made by the sending of messages to recipients. Forms of messages include function invocation, signals, and data packets. Prominent models of computation based on message passing include the Actor model and the process calculi.
Microkernel operating systems pass messages between one kernel and one or more server blocks.
Distributed object and remote method invocation systems like ONC RPC, Corba, Java RMI, DCOM, SOAP and similar are message passing systems. The term is also used in High Performance Computing using Message Passing Interface.
The concept of message passing is also used in Bayesian inference over Graphical models.
Overview
Message passing systems have been called "shared nothing" systems because the message passing abstraction hides underlying state changes that may be used in the implementation of sending messages.
History
In 1977, Carl Hewitt put forward the thesis that computational control structures can be viewed as patterns of passing messages.
References
"Message passing"