Is CORBA legacy?

For a distributed computing project starting today, with 0 legacy components, are there any good reasons to look into CORBA?

Note: I wrote this in 2009. In 2025, the only convincing reason to still use CORBA is for interoperability with existing CORBA-based services.

There are still situations where CORBA could be a good answer:

• when you are building a distributed system involving multiple programming languages and multiple platforms,
• when your system entails sending complex data structures ... and SOAP doesn't cut it,
• when you have high rates of messaging ... and HTTP doesn't cut it, or
• when you have to interact with existing CORBA clients and/or services.

But having said that, there are alternatives that do what CORBA does, only better ... or so they claim. For example ZeroC's ICE

EDIT @fnieto chimes in to say (or imply) that ICE is not free, but TAO is.

This is inaccurate and misleading.

1. ICE is GPL'ed software, and is available for free download. You only needed to pay for ICE if you / your company are not prepared to live with the terms of the GPL. (Or if you need support.)
2. I used ICE as an example of an alternative to CORBA. TAO is CORBA. The ICE authors make a credible case as to why they can get better performance by not being CORBA compliant.
3. TAO is by no means the only free / open-source CORBA implementation. I can think of 3 others, off the top of my head.

The down-side of ICE is lack of interoperability with CORBA middleware stacks, but in my experience interoperability of different CORBA implementations could also be problematic. (Things may have improved in that area ... but I haven't done any CORBA work since ~2002, so I'm a bit out of touch.)