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What alternative do you propose?

I don't have an easy one. If you can do things in-process, a shared library means type safety. But I don't know what the best practice for IPC (which this is essentially a form of) is.

- Structured data instead of always somewhat wonky text formats

- Request-reply -- Acknowledge stuff. Especially when it's security relevant

- For security relevant stuff, don't just silently fail or fall back to some idiot default. Eg. say a command message for setting a password doesn't contain the password field -- then fail the request, don't assume an empty password.

(Ie. be liberal about what you accept but not too liberal)

You shouldn't be liberal at all if security is a concern. You should be strict, use a well defined format and refuse anything that doesn't comply.

It isn't difficult to be strict so being liberal is just asking for trouble uselessly.

I propose protocol buffers or equivalent.

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