Back in the COM days, we were largely a C++ shop. There were times where our business folks did not quite know what they wanted - so we'd prototype the COM com

Back in the COM days, we were largely a C++ shop. There were times where our business folks did not quite know what they wanted - so we'd prototype the COM component out in VB. It worked a little too well - for about a quarter of the time, you ended up with something that only had a 10% (or less) performance penalty.