[LAD] non-blocking intra-process messaging

Hi, I have some multi-threaded audio software that passes data around using pointers to data structures. However, I'd like a more generalized message passing system. The only requirements are that it cannot block the sender or receiver (they are considered soft 'real-time'), and also that multiple senders should be able to send a message to the same receiver at the same time (which makes non-blocking circular buffers a difficult approach). I'm thinking of designing something that uses atomic_ops to implement quick locking of portions of a message queue. Anyways, my idea is to use something like OSC for message passing, but without the "path" part of the OSC address. (That is, the path is already resolved, since threads share memory..) Does anyone know if something like this has been done previously? Ideally it would easily scale to inter-process communication, if in the future I wanted to turn my threads into processes. (Another reason for basing it on OSC..) Does any of this make sense? Basically I've been running into a lot of shared-memory threading problems, which in retrospect should have been expected and avoidable if I'd spent more time designing my message passing system. (At the time I hadn't heard of the atomic_ops library.) I might have designed the whole system to use timers instead of threads and avoided a lot of headaches, but I wanted the threads to be splittable across CPU cores. (Which arguably is a good reason to use processes.. admittedly the whole thing is starting to point me towards the "threads are a bad idea" camp.) Cheers, Steve