[ptx]

VBScript and JScript were very much tied to COM, as was the document object model in Internet Explorer, where these scripting implementations were used, up until version 6/7.

What happened was that Internet Explorer moved towards a more standards-compliant JavaScript implementation, leaving the kind-of-ES3-compliant JScript behind, while at the same time COM was being generally deemphasized in favor of .NET.

It's still there, but its usefulness is limited by several things:

* It can only make use of libraries that expose dynamically bound COM objects. No C libraries (so no win32 API) and no .NET.

* Even then, it can't subscribe to COM events, as far as I can tell. (There is some weird mechanism with some external XML file in certain contexts.)

* As for JScript, I haven't found any transpilers that target ECMAScript 3, so it would be difficult to use modern libraries with it. (And it would probably be slow anyway.)