Not very kind, but when the author says (in reference to Java’s R(emote)M(ethod)I(nvocation) mechanism) "If you wanted to implement something comparable in C++, however, you would need to throw away the C++ method-call mechanism and replace it with your own custom message-passing system. Each C++ class would implement a single handleMessage() method, which would then call the "real" methods. By the time you’ve done this, you’ve thrown away a lot of the convenience of using C++ in the first place.", I find that very true. You do do a lot of having to throw away many of the features of C++ when doing something like this. C++ is great OO-wise, in my opinion, but it seems like it would have trouble with flexibility when dealing with "new" technologies.