COM

Raised as a usability problem by 17 people on Hacker News over 18 years (2009–2026), in 17 threads.

People raised many different problems with COM, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 18 complaints

COM objects are annoying to use, a layer of extra work to wade through2026-06-13
Raw UUIDs make COM hard to understand and start using2025-12-10
Hard to understand COM's purpose and how to use it; leaks memory2025-12-10
Unintuitive APIs lead to incomprehensible chains of QueryInterface calls2025-08-11
No basic syntax highlighting for IDL files in Visual Studio2024-06-28
COM was a pain to deal with, especially from .NET2023-12-16
Obscure, awkward interfaces like IMarshal and IDispatch are hard to use2023-08-28
Giant GUIDs are impossible to recognize or memorize; naming layer used inconsistently2023-07-14
Interacting with COM without tooling is horrible, verbose, and laborious to set up2022-11-07
Getting COM typing and interfaces correct in C++ is awful and error-prone2022-05-06
Getting the right DLL version registered and installed was maddening2019-06-24
Hard to find documentation for a COM interface2017-02-03
Scripting against COM or vendor interfaces was an awful experience, often undocumented2016-08-19
Confusing, duplicated APIs with complicated rules; people frequently get IUnknown wrong2016-08-09
Extending apps via COM requires manual memory management, GUIDs, HRESULTs and QueryInterface chains2012-10-04
Problems are incomprehensible even in the debugger, and macros are hard to trace2010-07-16
Errors shown as a dialog saying "Error -1" with no useful detail, halting the call2010-03-22
Too many layered concepts to learn before getting work done2009-08-21