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Comment by fassssst | Hacker News Reader

Nothing like reinventing COM :)

“COM but you can actually implement it from the docs” is surprisingly compelling, honestly. There is just an absurd number of obscure corners in the original, from DCE RPC all the way to the highest levels (although those are not the only source of COM grief—IDispatch is an abomination; IStream is needlessly annoying; IMarshal is awful to use but at the same time I don’t think actually has a convincing equivalent elsewhere; etc.).

Ah, the pain of getting a DCOM connection working shudder

COM was pretty reliable. Yes, it was needlessly annoying and gave CS folk the screaming ab-dabs, but it worked and was predictable.

I can see COM-in-WASM being really useful. Especially if we can dynamically load components. And not only for browser coding.

Nobody has a good IPC/RPC-based abstraction set right now. And everybody is kind of struggling with that.

Look at the latest Microsoft thing about embedding Python in Excel. They're going the wrong direction. What everybody wants is to be able to drive Excel from Python aka an API that people could hook into.

Even WASM is kind of ... weak ... because it has to deal with the lowest common denominator--a web page with a single thread of execution and no access to anything.

And, COM wasn't terrible--it's just that the languages attempting to support it were very underpowered at the time. COM with VB6 created a huge ecosystem that probably still isn't really matched today.

COM works well, it’s still heavily used on Windows. The Windows Runtime API’s are just COM! It lets C++\C#\JavaScript\Rust all talk to each other in the same app.

I just think it’s funny since it was so heavily derided by people. It took awhile for me to appreciate its reasons to exist, and I still don’t like some of the vocabulary they used.

And thus AREXX rises from the ashes of the corpse of Amiga.

Please clarify for those of us who aren't Amiga aficionados.

REXX itself was a language made by IBM used for all manner of purposes, AREXX was a slightly simplified take on that for the Amiga. A number of programs on the Amiga would have an AREXX "port" which provided a set of APIs which could be called from AREXX to control aspects of the application. This meant that AREXX was often used to control multiple applications or chain them together (a bit like a batch control language used to achieve an objective by having each of the programs perform part of some greater whole).

Streams sounds more like DrawBridge!

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