IPC
Inter-process communication — how processes on the same machine exchange data (pipes, sockets, shared memory).
Definition
Inter-Process Communication covers all mechanisms by which separate processes on the same machine exchange data: Unix domain sockets, named pipes, shared memory, message queues. Claude Code's stdio MCP transport is IPC: the parent process and the server communicate over the child's stdin/stdout pipes. IPC avoids the overhead of full network sockets.
When to use
See also
- MCP — Anthropic's open standard for connecting LLMs to external tools and data sources over JSON-RPC.