Aerospace current IPC is slow and should be extended.

[SacrilegeWasTaken]

Hey there!

I’m developing an app that integrates with AeroSpace and noticed that tasks executed through configs like:

exec-on-workspace-change = [
  "/bin/zsh",
  "-c",
  "curl -s localhost:43551"
]

run quite slowly. For example, polling three aerospace-cli commands every 0.2 seconds feels noticeably faster in comparison.

I think we could improve this by introducing shared memory access for workspace data. Each time the workspaces state changes (workspace count, opened/closed apps, etc.), AeroSpace could copy the current Workspace.all into shared memory. Then, any external process could read this data directly and get updates instantly — a radical but very efficient IPC mechanism. Also this solution needs to be coveted with semaphores or better pthread_rwlock_t Swift analogue to avoid data races.

Alternatively, improving the performance of the existing mechanism would also help.
Another option could be adding an exec-on-workspaces-update configuration, which triggers a command whenever workspace data changes, or perhaps separate exec-on-xxx hooks for each type of update. This would let side applications react quickly using lightweight aerospace-cli calls.