[tsimionescu]

My experience was that P/Invoke is much easier, but of course YMMV. COM I never played around with.

I also found a pretty ugly bug in the C++/CLR compiler - if you used in-place initialization for an array (something like auto arr = Object[]{obj1}), it would allocate an array of length 0xC0FFEE and set the elements you specified. They acknowledged the bug but said they will only fix it in a future version of the language.

This told me all I needed to know about how popular it actually was.

[pjmlp]

It is popular enough for being one of the major milestones on .NET Core 3.1.

P/Invoke can only do so much if a C++ library doesn't provide a C ABI, and WinDev loves to publish COM based APIs since they won the Longhorn dispute.