Comment by ratmice

I totally agree with this and think it's a valid concern, It difficult to get the best of both worlds here within the confines of the unix process model.

The query style compiler isn't by necessity a single process. You could imagine an implementation based on the actor model or almost any other message passing system where the queries are driven externally. That the expedient way to do this is by stuffing everything into a giant process is regrettable.