[ClumsyPilot]

Am I wrong in thinking that this mild form of schizophrenia ( no official ABI but dont break the ABI) is part of the reason why we now live in a world where all applications talk to each-other through sockets, incurring huge overheads?

[earenndil]

You can use shmem instead of sockets, which is pretty fast. Not as fast as a direct call, but pretty good; good enough for most purposes.

[quotemstr]

Have you actually measured? The overhead isn't the socket, but the marshaling and unmarshaling, and you need these things for sockets, shared memory, or any other IPC.

[earenndil]

You don't need to (un)marshal necessarily; stuff like strings, or arrays of integers, can go straight across. And if you have to pass large amounts of data, they'll probably take a form that's something like that.

[ClumsyPilot]

shmem = shared memory?

[earenndil]

Yes.

[ncmncm]

Yes.

Applications talk via sockets to reduce coupling, thus fragility.