COM/CORBA/DCOP (was: Hello people. I have some questions)

[Duncan Grisby]

In article <mailman.999307321.30504.python-list at python.org>,
 Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams  <ignacio at openservices.net> wrote:

>> I don't know anything about DCOP but my guess is that it's closer to
>> COM than CORBA.  Most people considered CORBA too heavyweight for
>> connecting desktop apps and were surprised that ORBit (the Gnome ORB)
>> was able to get as good performance as it does.
>
>The difference was that MICO (KDE's ORB) was written in C++, while ORBit is
>written in C. ORBit has been tweaked and honed to death, whereas they could
>only do so much for MICO.

There's nothing inherently slow about C++ ORBs. MICO was never
designed for performance -- indeed its stated design goal is code
clarity and wide feature range at the expense of performance. Why the
KDE people didn't pick one of the better-performing C++ ORBs, I don't
know.

I don't know why people would consider CORBA too heavyweight for
connecting desktop apps -- the few performance comparisons between COM
and CORBA I have seen show CORBA to be as fast or faster than COM.

Cheers,

Duncan.

-- 
 -- Duncan Grisby  \  Research Engineer  --
  -- AT&T Laboratories Cambridge          --
   -- http://www.uk.research.att.com/~dpg1 --