Modern languages and Microsoft's component object model

As the computer industry's reliance on component software increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to integrate complex component systems.Modern development environments take a variety of approaches to simplifying this programming problem.This article describes how three programming language implementations provide access to Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM), and how they attempt to reduce the complexity of writing and using COM objects.Using COM is complex for two reasons.COM semantics may not match the object semantics of the language and hence require "glue code" between COM and the application.In addition, COM itself is very complex, with a large API and many special cases.Three contrasting approaches are described here:• Extension using code generation.