Given the sample code, actually that particular problem wouldn't apply either in the case of pipes or sockets. I'm not sure whether the code is actually complete, but it looks like the messages being passed are quite short, which means that they won't ever be fragmented. I guess you could still have a problem with getting two messages at once, though.

Likewise, using "\n" as your message terminator won't work if your messages might contain "\n"s (I wasn't convinced such was impossible based on the offered code). But it seems at least a good starting point.