Interfacing ActiveX/COM-objects "natively" in Emacs

[Mathias Dahl]

(I apologize if this is the wrong group for discussing this. I was
thinking of posting to address@hidden, but my question is
from a developer standpoint more than a user, so...)

Much of my Emacs-time is at work, using MS Windows. For some small
hacks (those who read gnu.emacs.sources might have seen some of them)
I have needed to access different COM-objects, and the only way to do
that seems to be by using an external program, in my case cscript.exe,
the command-line VBScript interpreter.

The basic operation is to call cscript.exe with a vbscript file name
and other arguments, let the script access the objects in question,
put data on standard out, and let Emacs parse that data.

This works quite well (apart from the overhead of calling the external
program and parsing the data) but for each time I need to access a
different object I need to write yet another small script for
manipulating that particular object. It seems a bit awkward.

Basically, what I need is "only" to instantiate different
ActiveX/COM-objects and use the methods and properties they provide,
not the VBScript programming language itself.

I remember reading about someone trying to make Emacs an
ActiveX-object, and although that sounds interesting, this is not what
I think is needed here. I also remember seeing that Python has some
module that is capable of doing ActiveX-work.

OK, enough blabbing, here is my question: what would be needed to make
it possible doing this more "natively" from Emacs? Is it possible
without rewriting major parts of Emacs?

Would it be possible to do using some "plug-in" dll? Is anyone else
besides be interested in it? In my opinion, it would be quite useful
for accessing Windows-specific things like Registry data, automating
"ActiveX-enabled" software (both proprietary and Free).

Thanks for you time.

/Mathias