I agree there are definitely shitty chunks Windows, but there are still some very solid foundations there to this day.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/working-through-things...
AFAIK it is possible to do this on Linux (either through mprotect + SIGSEGV or userfaultfd) but it's slow. But there's a work-in-progress patch that the Collabora folks (probably on a contract from Valve if I'd had to guess, as some games do use this) are working on which will add a new fast way of doing this.
Even in current form, userfaultfd is useful for GC, so Linux's lack of the feature in 2015 was unfortunate. Android 13 added a new GC taking advantage of userfaultfd: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2022/08/android-13....
> A new garbage collector based on the Linux kernel feature userfaultfd is coming to ART on Android 13... The new garbage collector... leading to as much as ~10% reduction in compiled code size.
The nice thing about COM is that it provides a well-defined, C-based ABI for calling object-oriented interfaces; if your language has a FFI that supports C, then you can call COM objects.
I’m a big believer that COM bindings for any language with automatic memory management should not expose refcounts directly to the programmer (at least in 90% of cases). It’s not far fetched — the original, pre-.NET Visual Basic did a very good job of this.
The goals were good, and other platforms haven't really tried to achieve them (KParts and Bonobo were the closest equivalents but both were abandoned a long time ago, DBUS isn't quite the same thing). But COM was fiddly.