I''m trying to think of a project to use while learning COM, and I am wondering if the following sounds like a good or bad idea: I''m currently working on a scripting language that I want people to easily be able to take advantage of. Oringonally I was just going to stick the classes into a DLL that you could include. The scripting language has two parts (basically), the compiler and the virtual machine. At first I was just going to give the vm an instance of the compiler and then you would just call something like vm.compile( "script" ) followed by a vm.run. It then occured to me that someone may want to simply load compiled scripts and run them at runtime rather than compile them at runtime. For this reason I made it so that the compiler and virtual machine are independent of each other. Would it be an effective use of COM if I were to create an object called something like ScriptingEngine from which you could get a Compiler and/or a VirtualMachine interface from? It seems like a good idea to me, but then again I don''t know COM yet.

Seems like a pretty good idea. However you don''t really "NEED" COM in this case. If all you want is the ability to pass around interfaces at runtime then it can be done via standard C++ interfaces. COM is very nice, and I was trying to find applications in game related projects as well, but then i decided that i simply didnt need all the features with their overhead as of yet.