SOM and COM: A comparison of technologies summarized

CRANK

This document was prepared as a counterbalance to an IBM document that attempted to position SOM as a viable alternative to COM by perpetuating some completely unfounded myths about both technologies. It is important to note that:This document is not meant to act as a stand-alone comparison of SOM and COM, but rather as an antidote to a completely random WebPage!COMObject enabling technology consisting of an simple yet elegant object model and a lightweight runtime support system sufficient for implementing language-independent objects on virtually any platform that supports dynamic linking. COM is a binary standard that imposes no additional runtime cost to objects created using traditional C++ compilers and can be hosted in any language that supports implementing and calling functions with C linkage though a pointer. COM solves the problems of multi-language access and fragile base classes allowing class libraries to be distributed and reused in binary form with release to release c…