> remote calls looked the same as local calls To some degree this is actually nice! I mean, one major reason local API calls (in the same programming language)

> remote calls looked the same as local calls To some degree this is actually nice! I mean, one major reason local API calls (in the same programming language) are nicer than network calls – besides avoiding latency – is that network APIs rarely come with strong type safety guarantees (or at least you have to bolt them on on top, think OpenAPI/Swagger). So I actually wish we were in a world where network calls were more similar to local API calls in that regard. But of course, in the concrete situation you're describing, the fact that > all local functions calls had parameters serialized to XML sounds like a very bad idea.