[oldandtired]

One of the basic causes for slowness is how the underlying language implementation does procedure calls.

Decades ago, I looked at how Microsoft handled procedure calls and returns of data. I found the same problem elsewhere.

The problem was related to copying of data. A single API call could involve (at the time) up to 100's of copy actions of the same value for each subsequent internal call. The actual processing of that data was minimal in the scheme of things.

This has been a problem amongst many others over the decades and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

Things that we did as a matter of course when resources were restricted have been dispensed with once those resource limits were exceeded. The lessons have subsequently been forgotten.

[creshal]

DBus is just as bad (its serialization scheme is bespoke and bloated), and people insist on putting its insanely inefficient overhead into everything so they can claim they "isolated" apps (as long as you ignore the gaping holes torn for and by dbus).

[smallstepforman]

Nice observation.