I recently gave a presentation at the Northwest C++ Users Group on message passing. The video and the slides are available here:

Here’s my premise: I needed a flexible system of primitives for passing messages between threads in C++. After studying existing solutions in C++ (Boost, MPI) and in other languages (Haskell MVars and Caml channels and events) I created my own C++ mini-library. It’s general (no restrictions on message types or message storage), composable (allows waiting on multiple polymorphic channels), type-safe, and first-class (you may pass channels inside messages). Considering all this, the library turned out to be surprisingly simple. One thing I gave up on, and I think it was the right decision, is location transparency. Message passing between threads is fundamentally different from message passing between processes or network nodes. Performance and first-class-ness require substantially different interfaces, not to mention different implementations.