Cross-platform alternative to COM

Question

I\'ve been enamoured with component based programming (be it with COM, another system, or just using the paradigm in plain C++). It requires a bit of getting used to, if one is

Answer 1

Take a look at D-Bus (yes, for windows too), which is the modern spiritual heir of various componentry frameworks (CORBA, Gnome Bonobo, KDE's DCOM).

If the cross-process marshalling turns out to be a performance problem, look to move the heavy lifting to shared memory (boost.interprocess will help keep it cross-platform).