Been playing around with nodelets and have a curiosity. I understand that their design was driven by the need to pass objects by handles (pointers) across messaging rather than full copies. 

Recently however, one of the willow garage guys (Josh maybe? I can't remember) pointed me to try some tests a little while ago with node handles. If carefully passing and publishing a boost pointer, then a subscriber in the same process will simply receive that pointer and bypass all the tcp/ip layers. Was this implemented recently as a result of the work on nodelets? If not, are there any important differences between this and nodelets communication mechanisms?

Actually, I still like the nodelets. Being able to drop your libraries containing nodelets onto the nodelet manager via roslaunch file is awesome. You can put together an interrupt driven control system designed entirely from libraries and xml without the need to even program any binaries in most cases. Awesome.