People could (and did) design robust CORBA and (D)COM objects, but the overhead was too high in some (many?) cases. Overhead in development time, but also run time. If I can pass a const pointer to a bunch of data (if I know the consumer will live in the same memory space), then that's way faster (in development and run speed) than having to marshal that data into a common byte-order and alignment etc., most likely requiring copying, keeping track of who changed what when, ...
Now that I have my old fogey hat on anyway, I might as well state the 'old wine in new bags' feeling I get with articles like this. Encapsulation and separation of concerns is good you say? But inconvenient because there is overhead? So infrastructure to manage dependencies and deployment of sets of loosely coupled components is useful? Whodathoughtthat!
