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Comment by FooBarWidget | Hacker News Reader

You make it sound like D-Bus is a first attempt and even a hastily put together attempt to solve its target problem. It's not.[1] D-Bus is heavily influenced by (and intended to replace) DCOP, the communication system used by KDE 1 and KDE 2. DCOP was widely lauded as an extremely well-designed system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Bus#History_and_adoption

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yep. as noted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8648995 it wasn't even just dcop - KDE had tried CORBA before switching to DCOP, and GNOME of course tried CORBA (two different ORBs), then tried Bonobo-on-top-of-CORBA, and SOAP. There were tons of documented protocols on top of X11 (many still in use today). And that's ignoring the countless ad-hoc solutions that various apps used...

Linux desktops are implemented as process swarms and communication among processes is one of the central things they have to deal with.

CORBA and SOAP are things that must not be named... The horror is too real. Of course, Dbus is better than CORBA and SOAP, almost anything is.

How old is CORBA, again? And how crazy is SOAP?

It isn't better than those categorically. But it's definitely better than them for building a multi-process desktop.

"better" depends on what you are trying to do.

Of course CORBA and SOAP are considered old and horrible now, 15 years later. But currently-popular stuff is in many ways equally unsuited to coordination of local desktop processes, because it's not designed for that.

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