berend: As the author of the rant on the main page, let me respond. COM is a horrible botch by any measure. I have written C++ CORBA clients (using the TAO toolkit, which is excellent), and I guarantee you that writing CORBA is a hell of a lot cleaner and more consistent than COM/ATL. And with TAO, it's more performant and more secure as well. That's not bloviating, berend: that's a simple fact, and I can back it up with IDL and code samples. Care to take me on? (You'll lose, I promise you!)

You suggest that COM was a good idea originally, but technology has made it obsolete. I disagree. COM was never a good idea. It violates the KISS principle, is badly designed (it's a binary rather than a protocol message standard) and badly implemented (see my Registry rant).

COM sucks. It has always sucked, and always will suck. It was a bad, short-term solution that Microsoft forced everyone to accept.