Ah! Yeah, I've completely forgotten that the Itanium ABI also guarantees a standard vtable layout. Thanks!
Were starting to convert my app from a Windows-only app to a cross platform one, so this makes me happy that my "COM lite" scheme would also be stable on linux.
As for returning pure COM objects through a C interface: Yeah, I've considered that, but like I wrote in my comment below to pjmlp, I don't like COM personally, and I want to simplify writing the components' code as much as possible, since the team which writes them isn't a team of software developers but rather in a supporting role. They do know basic C++/C# but don't know COM.
Also getting rid of COM would be the first thing done for cross platform support, anyway.
Due to experience trying to link some code, especially C++, I'd probably rather start by implementing a simplified COM system first rather than dealing with extern C
Were starting to convert my app from a Windows-only app to a cross platform one, so this makes me happy that my "COM lite" scheme would also be stable on linux.
As for returning pure COM objects through a C interface: Yeah, I've considered that, but like I wrote in my comment below to pjmlp, I don't like COM personally, and I want to simplify writing the components' code as much as possible, since the team which writes them isn't a team of software developers but rather in a supporting role. They do know basic C++/C# but don't know COM.
Also getting rid of COM would be the first thing done for cross platform support, anyway.