> im not sure if its a per executable thing or actually built into the shell?

It's built into the shell in zsh, and it must also be in bash. By way of explaining how I know, I am first going to tell you a little bit about the program called strace, but probably not backwards-talking little people:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strace

When invoked like so:

    strace diff <(ls /path/to/dir/1) <(ls /path/to/dir/2)

strace positions itself between the running process which it invokes (in this case, diff) and the OS kernel. It then prints for you all of the communications traffic, in the form of system calls and return values, between the kernel and the process. Because it runs after the shell has expanded the command line, it gets to see the command line as the program sees it, as opposed to how it was typed.

Now, the output scrolls by pretty fast (there is a -o option to save the output to a file, which I neglected to bother with here), so I saw the end first:

    stat("/proc/self/fd/11", {st_mode=S_IFIFO|0600, st_size=0, ...}) = 0
    stat("/proc/self/fd/12", {st_mode=S_IFIFO|0600, st_size=0, ...}) = 0
    open("/proc/self/fd/11", O_RDONLY)      = 5
    open("/proc/self/fd/12", O_RDONLY)      = 7

and so on. Obviously, diff is getting information from /proc/self/fd/11 and /proc/self/fd/12. Weird. Where do those come from?

Scrolling up to the top of my xterm, we have the answer:

    execve("/usr/bin/diff", ["diff", "/proc/self/fd/11", "/proc/self/fd/12"], [/* 68 vars */]) = 0

You can look up execve for yourself; the upshot is, its second argument is the argv passed in to the process by the runtime environment, which reflects the command line after shell expansion. Thus, the <(ls foodir) stuff is a shell feature, and not per-command.