Reply to Andrei,
It follows that message passing is not only an attractive model
I'm thinking implementation not model. How is the message passing implemented? OS system calls (probably on top of kernel level shared memory)? user space shared memory? Special hardware? If you can't get #3, I'd rather a good standard implemntation using #2 (and a back door :).
for programming at large, but also a model that's closer to machine than memory sharing.
I think I see what your getting at,.. even for shared memory on a deep cache; the cache invalidation system /is/ your message path.
Andrei
