From what I gather postgres isn't doing conventional IPC but instead it uses shared memory, which means the same mechanism threads use but with way higher complexity
IPC, to me, includes the conventional shared memory resources (memory segments, locks, semaphores, condition variable, etc.) used by these systems: resources acquired by processes for the purpose of communication with other processes.
I get it though. The most general concept of shared memory is not coupled to an OS "process." You made me question whether my concept of term IPC was valid, however. So what does one do when a question appears? Stop thinking immediately and consult a language model!
Q: Is shared memory considered a form of interprocess communication?
GPT-4: Yes, shared memory is indeed considered a form of interprocess communication (IPC). It's one of the several mechanisms provided by an operating system to allow processes to share and exchange data.
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Why does citing ChatGPT make me feel so ugly inside?
In that view, I always saw shared memory as IPC, in that it is a tool commonly used to exchange data between processes, but of course it is not strictly tied to any process in particular. This is similar to files, which if you squint are a form of IPC too, and are also not tied to any specific process.
> Why does citing ChatGPT make me feel so ugly inside?
That's probably because, in cases like this, it's not much different to stating it yourself, but is more noisy.
Its the modern let me Google that for you. Just like people don't care what the #1 result on Google is, they also don't care what ChatGPT has to say about it. If they did, they'd ask it themselves.