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Comment by _wmd | Hacker News Reader

"I saw OLE, I saw Outlook Express, I wrote code for both, it's hard for me to believe in Microsoft"

Shitty apps and shitty tech :) XUL was conceptually nice but in reality a nightmare for efficiency and pretty much it was just hard to work with due to a lack of tooling and solid evolution over time. I don't know of many sad to see it go

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It is really hard to believe in Microsoft, even for card-carrying microsofties. Silverlight? VB6? The umpteen drm formats? DCOM? ActiveX?...

One can debate the details but in my opinion COM is fundamentally a great technology. Statically defined interfaces with extremely late bound, relatively large, opaque implementations. No inheritance. It's one of the only things that realises what Alan Kay was talking about when he talked about OOP (which is very different to what most people complain about). It's microservices and more and it works: It's still at the core of Windows and has served it well.

Well, except that having everything be virtual and atomically reference counted isn't the friendliest environment for compiler authors.

You can't do the Smalltalk/JS speculation tricks if you're a compiled AOT language (actually, even worse: a language-independent ABI). So COM performance will always be mediocre.

On the other hand, people working with .NET/SQL Server have been making a (great) living for 10 years.

Every company has its duds.

+100

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