Editing Reference counting (section)

===Component Object Model===
Microsoft's [[Component Object Model]] (COM) and [[Windows Runtime|WinRT]] makes pervasive use of reference counting. In fact, two of the three methods that all COM objects must provide (in the [[IUnknown]] interface) increment or decrement the reference count.  Much of the [[Windows Shell]] and many Windows applications (including [[Microsoft Internet Explorer|MS Internet Explorer]], [[Microsoft Office|MS Office]], and countless third-party products) are built on COM, demonstrating the viability of reference counting in large-scale systems.{{Citation needed|date=October 2022}}

One primary motivation for reference counting in COM is to enable interoperability across different programming languages and runtime systems. A client need only know how to invoke object methods in order to manage object life cycle; thus, the client is completely abstracted from whatever memory allocator the implementation of the COM object uses. As a typical example, a [[Visual Basic]] program using a COM object is agnostic towards whether that object was allocated (and must later be deallocated) by a C++ allocator or another Visual Basic component.