Type-safe message-passing is such a wonderful programming paradigm - and not just for distributed applications. I remember using QNX back in the 1990s. One of its fabulous features was a C message passing library allowing you to send arbitrary binary structs from one process to another. In the context of realtime software development, you often find yourself having one process that watches for events from a certain device, modify the information somehow, and then pass it on to another process that ends up doing something else. The message-passing idiom was far superior to what was available in Linux at the time (pipes and whatnot) because you were able to work with C structs. It was not strictly type safe (as is the case with FoundationDB’s library), but for the 1990s it was pretty great.

I remnber that ASN.1 does sth similar. You'd give a ASN.1 notation to a language generator (aka producing C) and not have to worry about parsing the actual structure anymore!