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

[Martin von Loewis]

Duncan Grisby <dgrisby at uk.research.att.com> writes:

> 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've heard various stories of why KDE stopped using CORBA; it being
too slow was just one reason. Other reported problems are:
- all client-server interaction was across address spaces, ie. there
  was no good support for in-process servers.
- when a client broke down, it was difficult to garbage-collect the
  servers, so they had many stray processes.
- it was perceived as being difficult to use by application developers.
  IMO, this was partially due to KDE offering wrapper libraries around
  common interfaces, for convenience. Thus, and application developer
  had many different ways to achieve the same effect, due to the layers
  of wrappers.

Regards,
Martin