CORBA may have failed, but not so much because of its design. Today we use HTTP as an RPC protocol, and RPC is what CORBA was. And today we have things like gRP

CORBA may have failed, but not so much because of its design. Today we use HTTP as an RPC protocol, and RPC is what CORBA was. And today we have things like gRPC (Google's protocol, based on HTTP/2 and Protocol Buffers) and Thrift (mainly driven by Facebook, I think). Microsoft's COM, of course, is very similar to CORBA, and hugely successful. CORBA is of course more complex, in ways that are less useful today. One particular feature was that the server always returned "live" objects that transparently proxied the calls back to the server. So you do something like getUser(123).delete(), and it would cause the User object's delete method to be called remotely. It turns out this generates a rather tight coupling between client and server; in particular, the client and server both have to use reference counting to keep objects alive as long as they are in use by a client. Things tend to get out of hand that way. While it is certainly magical to use a remote server exactly like a local one (locality transparency), it's also a performance trap. But of course Swagger/OpenAPI has nothing to do with this.