Nobody has a good IPC/RPC-based abstraction set right now. And everybody is kind of struggling with that.
Look at the latest Microsoft thing about embedding Python in Excel. They're going the wrong direction. What everybody wants is to be able to drive Excel from Python aka an API that people could hook into.
Even WASM is kind of ... weak ... because it has to deal with the lowest common denominator--a web page with a single thread of execution and no access to anything.
And, COM wasn't terrible--it's just that the languages attempting to support it were very underpowered at the time. COM with VB6 created a huge ecosystem that probably still isn't really matched today.
COM works well, it’s still heavily used on Windows. The Windows Runtime API’s are just COM! It lets C++\C#\JavaScript\Rust all talk to each other in the same app.
I just think it’s funny since it was so heavily derided by people. It took awhile for me to appreciate its reasons to exist, and I still don’t like some of the vocabulary they used.
REXX itself was a language made by IBM used for all manner of purposes, AREXX was a slightly simplified take on that for the Amiga. A number of programs on the Amiga would have an AREXX "port" which provided a set of APIs which could be called from AREXX to control aspects of the application. This meant that AREXX was often used to control multiple applications or chain them together (a bit like a batch control language used to achieve an objective by having each of the programs perform part of some greater whole).
Look at the latest Microsoft thing about embedding Python in Excel. They're going the wrong direction. What everybody wants is to be able to drive Excel from Python aka an API that people could hook into.
Even WASM is kind of ... weak ... because it has to deal with the lowest common denominator--a web page with a single thread of execution and no access to anything.
And, COM wasn't terrible--it's just that the languages attempting to support it were very underpowered at the time. COM with VB6 created a huge ecosystem that probably still isn't really matched today.