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Re:Ollama is now available on Windows in preview by jameshart on Saturday February 17, 2024 @09:39PM (#39415613)
> use Word as a remote spellchecker over COM

That's not how COM works. You can load Word's spellchecker into your process.

Windows added a spellchecking API in Windows 8. I've not dug into the API in detail, but don't see any indication that spellchecker providers run in a separate process (you can probably build one that works that way, but it's not intrinsic to the provider model).

Re:Ollama is now available on Windows in preview by bri3d on Saturday February 17, 2024 @10:04PM (#39415770)
Are you not familiar with out of process COM servers? A lot of Office automation is out of process, even inside of Office itself. Admittedly I’m not sure about the grammar checker specifically.

As for the Spellcheck API, external providers are explicitly out of proc: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/intl/about-t...

Anyway, my point still stands - building desktop apps using composition over RPC is neither new nor a bad idea, although HTTP might not be the best RPC mechanism (although… neither was COM…)