Actually I meant to post about that, but never got around to it. Basically the problem is that we need to use stdin to ship an early logging context (any any other pre boostrap data) as soon as the process starts. Brain, David, and I last week talked about the points above here about switching all communications to STDIN, and really the advantages aren't that much better over a TCP connection over loopback. If that connection drops both parties will know right away.