3 ms·
> It’s still unmatched for seamless language interoperability. I don't know about how it works on VMS, but Microsoft's COM is the only other attempt of languag
by zvrba 7y ago
> It’s still unmatched for seamless language interoperability.
I don't know about how it works on VMS, but Microsoft's COM is the only other attempt of language interop I know of. Recently I implemented a COM server, added `IDispatch` to its interfaces and suddenly I could control and test it from Porwershell with no extra effort on my part. Like, magic.
- goatinaboat 7y agoI’ve used COM (and before that CORBA) but these operate at a different level of abstraction. On VMS calling a Pascal function from FORTRAN “just worked” and then you could pass the return value to a C function or BASIC and it was fine. VMS IPC was done via mailboxes, send a message to a person or a program was the same. Which sounds weird to anyone used to the way Unix does mail, but it worked very well. (Yep, VAX BASIC was a serious language used for real, production applications)