Can you please elaborate on the comment that Apple is "now
effectively end-of-life-ing Carbon"?
Read the archives of this list. Especially the thread about 64-
bit Carbon.
All due respect, I'm not looking for a treasure hunt.
With all due respect, what you seek does not concern Apple. ;-)
I have already spent some time with Google and the mailing list
searches, and did not find what I was looking for. I'm looking for
some definitive statement from Apple regarding the future of Carbon.
And I'd like for someone to give me a million dollars. Get used to
disappointment. What you want or are seeking aside, Apple is being
pretty much silent on the long term future of Carbon, and
historically you can't trust everything they say anyway. It seems you
can believe anything they say to the effect that Carbon support will
decrease, and anything else is a crap shoot. They said Carbon was a
"first-class citizen," and then starting about a year ago or so they
changed that to say that new features would be available in Cocoa and
Carbon applications could implement them using Cocoa. They said at
WWDC 2006 that there would be 64-bit support for Carbon. They
actually implemented that, but then engineering management decided to
pull the parts that are unique to Carbon applications (the HIToolbox
UI parts), which makes it makes it impossible to write a Carbon GUI
64-bit application.
Apple has not deprecated any parts of Carbon other than old
technology like QuickDraw. It's unlikely Apple will cease to support
Carbon seriously for some time to come because so many applications
still use it, such as everything from Microsoft and Adobe, and
neither of those companies is going to rewrite huge code bases any
time soon to switch to Cocoa. However, Apple has said that Cocoa is
where they will be focusing their engineering efforts in the future
and I think you can take that to the bank.
In short, there is no road map for Carbon. There's only an decreasing
amount of engineering resources expended on it. It's that downward
trend that people have extrapolated to mean that Carbon's useful
lifetime now has an expiration date on it.
It does seem like a nice summary of some messages on this mailing
list. But it doesn't really answer my question.
That's because there *is* no definitive answer. People have pointed
you to the best information available, which is largely more
speculation than information at this point. The greater the extent to
which Apple is silent on this (and any other) issue, the more
flexibility they have in their planning without reneging on past
statements the way they did regarding 64-bit support.
Larry
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Carbon-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/carbon-dev/email@hidden
