This was the premise behind various component platforms, e.g. OLE, CORBA, OpenDoc which were, in many ways, the GUI equivalent of command line shells.
We could see a renaissance in that area if technologies similar to Electron and ubiquitous app stores make these more feasible.
(To toot my own horn, I think https://tenet-lang.org/ would be helpful in building well versioned APIs to allow intercommunication with shared semantics.)
It's a bit late for this thread, but Android Intents and the related WebIntents were kind of similar to OLE, but it seems neither captured the attention of the market.
We could see a renaissance in that area if technologies similar to Electron and ubiquitous app stores make these more feasible.
(To toot my own horn, I think https://tenet-lang.org/ would be helpful in building well versioned APIs to allow intercommunication with shared semantics.)