Well first of all what you linked supports my claim that 2/3 of Pharo users are MacOS and Linux users which I based on another survey which pretty much verifies what you linked.

Second the vast majorities of libraries out other for any programming language are cross platform so I am willing to bet that we will attract even more users if we emphasize cross platform support instead of libraries that OS exclusive. Of course that implies good support for Windows too.��

It will be kinda ironic Microsoft to beats us in the ability to be cross platform.

Third I already said I fully support the effort to bring COM features to Pharo, the exact wording "By the way I am all for COM for Pharo" leave little to doubt if nothing at all. I would not use nor I would recommend using a OS specific library but there are definitely scenarios where it makes sense to use one and having it around is much better than not having it around.

On Sun, Oct 2, 2016 at 6:46 PM Esteban A. Maringolo <emaringolo@gmail.com> wrote:
2016-10-02 10:57 GMT-03:00 Dimitris Chloupis <kilon.alios@gmail.com>:
> By the way I am all for COM for Pharo, the issue is that 2/3 of our
> community are MacOS and Linux users , I dont even remember the last time we
> had a Windows only topic in the mailing list. Modern languages generally
> avoid using OS specific libraries, the last exceptions be C# and Swift and
> C# definetly looks like it will be fully cross platform soon enough (it
> already is because of Mono).

I wouldn't state such affirmations without a proper surveying.

My latest survey related with RDBMS support [1] showed that the users
of Windows are on par with the users of MacOS.

I am a Windows user, who runs most of the Pharo images inside Linux
VMs not because I don't want to run them in Windows, but because the
current support of Windows is somewhat limited.

Having COM support for Pharo in a Windows environment would be a big
enabler to a lot of current users of Smalltalk that don't use Pharo.

Esteban A. Maringolo

[1] https://medium.com/@emaringolo/pharo-rdbms-support-survey-results-9c8f640878db#.ym049enul