Fast Zero-Copy Messaging with ROS 2 Intra-Process Communication

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

ROS 2 uses so-called “middleware” to perform communication between nodes. Over the years different middleware vendors have vied to become the Chosen Implementation, importantly by focusing on message passing efficiency. However:

You can be even more efficient by just skipping the middleware completely and achieve true zero-copy messaging!

And all you have to do is apply a simple convention:

All publishers SHOULD allocate messages using unique pointers.
All publishers SHOULD publish the messages using std::move.
All subscribers SHOULD expect either a ConstSharedPtr or a const reference.
Enable use_intra_process_comms

Read on to understand why.

RMW on SGVD.ai

Fast Zero-Copy Messaging with ROS 2 Intra-Process Communication