Modernizing COM in Windows Runtime
One drawback of adding an additional runtime on top of the Win32 and COM-based APIs provided by the operating system is the need to maintain interoperability libraries.
Each and every time new shiny APIs are added to the operating system, the corresponding managed code wrappers have to be provided as well. At the same time, making those operating system capabilities available to a wide range of languages (including C++, managed code, as well as JavaScript) became increasingly important.
As a result, the Windows folks decided to tackle a lot of the restrictions in COM that made consumption of their APIs less than trivial. This led to the design of the Windows Runtime (also known as WinRT), first introduced in ...
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