Can CORBA save a fringe language from becoming obsolete?

Not only does CORBA offer the advantage of distribution transparency for building applications, but it may provide esoteric programming languages with greater capabilities through its interoperability standard. Implementing interoperability with the CORBA/IIOP gives rise to several problems of compatibility between the CORBA computational model and those of the languages or sub-systems for which an IIOP bridge implementation is built. This paper describes how an actor-based language, Rosette, has been extended to provide support for distributed environments by extending the language with support for the CORBA/IIOP. The prototype IIOP interface has been implemented as a half-bridge. The Rosette types, object model and concurrency are very different from those generally available in conventional languages and CORBA. We discuss the issues relating to type compatibility, run-time type identification, and multi-threading of concurrent invocations.