python - dll access (ctypes or swig)

[Alex Martelli]

Larry Bates <larry.bates at websafe.com> wrote:

>  recently learned that you can ship COM as either an .EXE or a .DLL (nobody
> has yet let me know why).

The "why" is pretty obvious -- you may want to be able to instantiate a
COM object either in-process, or in its own separate process, depending
on that object's nature.  For example, a complete application that when
running exposes COM objects to let other processes drive/script it will
be an EXE file since it can also run independently.

In general I'm no big fan of MS's design, but COM, despite its
imperfections, was in fact seriously good (Don Box's "Essential COM", an
excellent book, went just into enough depth to let a developer really
appreciate that, IMHO).  I'm using the past tense because MS has been
trying to kill COM for a while now (but I notice that "Essential COM",
while 10 years-old, is _still_ in stock at Amazon -- so, I guess that so
far MS's attempts haven't _quite_ succeeded yet:-).


Alex