This debate is about Microsoft's decision some 14 years ago to build Windows userland components on top of C++ COM technology instead of .NET as some within Mic

This debate is about Microsoft's decision some 14 years ago to build Windows userland components on top of C++ COM technology instead of .NET as some within Microsoft had wanted. Those inside Microsoft who didn't want to force everyone to use a rather heavyweight runtime including a tracing GC won the debate. It would have affected almost everyone, not just those with use cases that can tolerate the significant additional resource usage. I merely made the observation that the difficulty to infer correct reference counting information from C#/Java code is what caused this rift and a lot of unproductive duplicated effort in our industry.