IPC transport to talk to other nodes on the same machine?

[SgtPooki]

It looks like we support IPC, but I haven't seen that we're using it for anything. I've never seen it in the wild.

js-libp2p/packages/transport-tcp/src/utils.ts

Lines 14 to 22 in 28c1b90

	// unix socket listening
	if (listenPath != null) {
	if (os.platform() === 'win32') {
	// Use named pipes on Windows systems.
	return { path: path.join('\\\\.\\pipe\\', listenPath) }
	} else {
	return { path: listenPath }
	}
	}

Is there a reason for that?

Is an IPC transport spec needed?

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If multiple nodes (of whatever language) are running on a single machine, it would be nice if they could discover each other via mdns, and then communicate directly via IPC, instead of TPC. In theory, there should be less moving parts, and it should be faster (and avoid routers entirely when appropriate)

Some stats for nodejs socket performance here: https://60devs.com/performance-of-inter-process-communications-in-nodejs.html (I updated the code to ESM at https://github.com/SgtPooki/node-ipc-test)

This could also make for an interesting "clustering" story between multiple implementations running on the same machine.