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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?

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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.

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.

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.

shmem = shared memory?

Yes.

Applications talk via sockets to reduce coupling, thus fragility.

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