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Comment by merb

1 day ago

Btw. Modern windows also superports Unix domain sockets, so if you have an app that has another service that will run on the same machine or on a different one it is not so bad to use grpc over uds.

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merb

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pjmlp  1 day ago

Nice idea, although it is still slower than COM.

COM can run over the network (DCOM), inside the same computer on its own process (out-proc), inside the client (in-proc), designed for in-proc but running as out-proc (COM host).

So for max performance, with the caveat of possibly damaging the host, in-proc will do it, and be faster than any kind of sockets.

  • merb  19 hours ago

    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  13 hours ago

      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  12 hours ago

      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.