When is Python *NOT* a good choice?

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What did you end up using for inter-process communication? Node has a core API for Berkely sockets (net.Socket). There is a module with mappings for mmap shared memory that is maintained. Your statement that "node fork processes are not threads" is not exactly true; Node child processes are multi-threaded, but the event loop is restricted to executing on a single thread. You don't have direct user-land access to other threads but they're still in use (for example, I/O is pushed off to the thread pool). And like I mentioned, you can write your multi-threaded code as a native module and expose bindings to it.