Whilst checking out GOODS, I stumble on Yet Another Compatibilty Library.
This one for Unix/Win32:

	http://www.ispras.ru/~knizhnik/SAL/ReadMe.htm

The interesting bit is (for me):

>Implementations of sockets are mostly based on socket library provided by
>operating system, but as far as local domain sockets are supported only in
>Unix, SAL provides very efficient implementation of local sockets for
>Win32. These local sockets are implemented by Win32 shared memory and
>semaphore objects and can be used to perform fast communication between
>processes within one computer. My experiments shows that this
>implementation of local sockets is about 10 times faster than original
>socket library provided by Microsoft.

Not that I understood this :)

FWIW!

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.