Earlier I posted an article by Don Box comparing SOM and COM, and I mentioned that WebAssembly is going through a similar evolution, and might benefit from some of the lessons of COM and SOM:

COM vs SOM: The Component Object Model and Some Other Model (1999) (archive.org)

https://web.archive.org/web/19990127184653/http://www.develo...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20266450

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20266627

>DonHopkins on June 24, 2019 | prev | next [–]

>This article comparing SOM and COM was written by Don Box. (first archived in January 1999, but doesn't say when published):
The Component Object Model and Some Other Model: A comparison of technologies revisited yet again:

https://web.archive.org/web/19990127184653/http://www.develo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model

>It was in response to IBM's somewhat misleading article comparing their SOM with Microsoft COM, last updated July 1994:

>The System Object Model (SOM) and the Component Object Model (COM): A comparison of technologies summarized

https://web.archive.org/web/19990117055950/http://www.develo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_Object_Model

>Don Box wrote an excellent in-depth book about COM: "Essential COM": "Nobody explains COM better than Don Box" -Charlie Kindel, COM Guy, Microsoft Corporation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Box

https://archive.org/details/essentialcom00boxd

>Unfortunately COM had the most un-googlable name possible (even before there was a Google), so Microsoft renamed it ActiveX.

>For more comtext, here are some notes I wrote about Win32, COM, OLE, OLE Controls, and ActiveX in 1996:

https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/pluggers/win32.html

https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/pluggers/com.html

https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/pluggers/ole.html

https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/pluggers/olecontrols.ht...

https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/pluggers/activex.html

>Here's a synopsis of COM I wrote in response to "Can someone link to a synopsis describing what "COM" is? It's hard to search for. (e.g. microsoft com visual studio)":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975257

>Don't get me wrong: I'm not advocating everybody jump on the COM bandwagon! I just think it's interesting and useful to know where it came from, how it evolved, what different layers were built on top of it, and how it compared to the alternatives at the time it was designed. And it's still pretty widely used, and will probably never go away.

>It certainly had a lot of problems and limitations, and OLE/ActiveX/DCOM/DirectX/etc took it way too far, then Mozilla XP/COM cloned it and also took it way too far (and then back again: see "decomification" and "decomtamination"), but it really was a pretty elegant and successful solution to the problems it was designed to address at the time.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:DeCOMtamination

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12968830

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=specif...

>It's always good to study history to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past!

>WebAssembly is going through a similar evolution, and might benefit from some of the lessons of COM and SOM.

Also, here's a description of the origins of COM that I posted earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975257

>Glad you asked! One of my favorite topics. ;)

>COM is essentially a formal way of using C++ vtables [1] from C and other languages, so you can create and consume components in any language, and call back and forth between them. It's a way of expressing a rational subset of how C++ classes work and format in memory, in a way that can be implemented in other languages.

>It was the outcome of the C / C++ / Visual Basic language wars at Microsoft.

>[...]

Also some stuff about Netscape's Internet Foundation Classes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837817

>Wow, a blast from the past! 1996, what a year that was.

>Sun was freaking out about Microsoft, and announced Java Beans as their vaporware "alternative" to ActiveX. JavaScript had just come onto the scene, then Netscape announced they were going to reimplement Navigator in Java, so they dove into the deep end and came up with IFC, which designed by NeXTStep programmers. A bunch of the original Java team left Sun and formed Marima, and developed the Castanet network push distribution system, and the Bongo user interface editor (like HyperCard for Java, calling the Java compiler incrementally to support dynamic script editing).

>[...]

There was also a previous discussion about Mozilla's WebAsembly System Interface:

Mozilla announces WebAssembly System Interface, what JVM should have been (theregister.co.uk):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19716179

https://www.theregister.com/2019/03/29/mozilla_wasi_spec/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19717416

>DonHopkins on April 22, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Mozilla announces WebAssembly System Interface, wh...

>>"WebAssembly has been designed to scale from tiny devices to large server farms or CDNs..."
What's ironic is that the "tiny devices" and even "high end professional desktop workstation and server devices" that Java was originally designed to run on when it was started in 1990 were MUCH tinier than the devices considered "tiny" today.

>How many more times faster is a typical smartphone today (Raspberry Pi 3: 2,451 MIPS, ARM Cortex A73: 71,120 MIPS) that a 1990 SparcStation 2 pizzabox (28.5 MIPS, $15,000-$27,000)?

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Instructions_per_second