> For instance I wanted to be able to display PDFs directly in VSCode. I went to look for a plugin, and there was one. You could have done that 20 years ago wi

> For instance I wanted to be able to display PDFs directly in VSCode. I went to look for a plugin, and there was one. You could have done that 20 years ago with COM components already. There was a thriving ecosystem where you could get a component for just about everything. Similar technologies were available on other platforms than Windows, like Bonobo (Gnome), Kparts (KDE), and whatever Mac had. It's a bit of a shame that component frameworks have gotten such a bad reputation (for complexity and insecurity), I think they are very misunderstood.