[merb]

Well if you need ipc to connect different languages, you will stay away from COM. Heck once you use anything but rust,c or c++ you should drop com. Even dotnet support for com is aweful. And if you ever written a outlook addin, than you will start hating com by yourself, thanks to god that Microsoft is going away from that

[p_l]

All new Windows API for over a decade are shipped as COM, iirc.

And COM ability to run in separate process is one of the things that makes it easier to run with different languages in my experience. Once you got over the hurdle of supporting COM, especially if you had support for type libraries and introspection-less COM, it was home free. Meanwhile I'm wary of dealing with a C++ library even if writing in C++

[pjmlp]

Good luck with that goal, after Longhorn went down, all its design ideas were resurfaced as COM, and since Vista, COM (alongside with its WinRT makeover), is the main API model in Windows.

Raw Win32 C API is stuck in Windows XP view of the world, with a few exceptions in some subsystems.

Yes COM tooling sucks, which is kind of sad given that it is the main API model in modern Windows, but I guess WinDev suffers from Stockhold syndrome.

AddIns are only moving away from COM, because otherwise they wouldn't work in your browser, so you get to use JavaScript and TypeScript instead, and on native Office they run inside a Webwidget, hurray for performance.

[fulladder]

I think I remember learning COM object programming in the late 1990s, and Longhorn would still have been an active project at that time. Been a long time, though, so maybe I'm mistaken.

[pjmlp]

Yes, and?

COM history traces back to OLE, introduced in Windows 3.0 replacing DDE.

.NET was designed as COM replacement, however the way things went down was something else.