Thanks! The idea of launching additional components nearly "natively" from the shell was compelling to me early on, but I agree that shared libraries with a more opinionated "host program" is probably a more practical approach.

Explicit shared memory regions is definitely the standard for this sort of a problem if you desire isolated address spaces. One area I want to explore further is using allocation/allocators that are aware of explicit shared memory regions, and perhaps ensuring that the regions get mmap'd to the same virtual address in all participants.