Re: 64-bit Carbon

By "more than an API", I was referring to the fact that Cocoa is Objective-C, a language I don't know and have no inclination to learn. C has served me well for years and the three times I've taken short courses on C++, I've come out dazed and confused. I've been avoiding C++ like the plague and Objective-C fits into that category as far as I'm concerned. Add Cocoa to Objective-C and if you could see me now, I'm making the "vampire stay away" sign, lol. I want to port my carbon-based app to XCode with as little work as possible and have it run on PPC and Intel, nothing more. Maybe that's possible but I doubt it from the hoops I had to jump through just to get it to build in XCode and then it still crashes in run time.

We've really gone off topic here but it seems that always happens when Apple makes an announcement that appears to be deprecating Carbon in any way. Leopard was billed as the 64-bit everything OS, the holy grail of 64-bit, the final step in the long transition from 32-bit to 64-bit systems. Oops, we forgot something, all those Carbon apps that still exist and make MacOS worth paying extra for. If Apple alienates the carbon developers, a lot of useful apps and utilities will fall by the wayside eventually.

On Jun 14, 2007, at 3:44 AM, Dair Grant wrote:

Tony Scaminaci wrote:

Carbon was intended as a transitional API from OS 9 to OS X and it  worked well for that purpose. Carbon's been around since the advent  of OS X so how long do you keep a transitional API alive?

I think it, in the form of HIToolbox, moved well beyond that remit years ago; a transitional API was something like QuickDraw (mostly works, but CG is more capable).

New features like Carbon Events or HIViews went well beyond what was needed to transition Mac OS 9 apps to Mac OS X - a lot of these was added in 10.2 or later.

The problem here is that the replacement API (Cocoa) is nothing like

carbon and as Larry has said, it's much more than just an API.

It's also a lot less than "just an API": Cocoa gives you relatively high-level building blocks, and no real way to modify their behaviour (aside from approaches like delegates, which are much more ad-hoc and a lot less flexible than Carbon Events).

Cocoa is also missing a lot of useful functionality that's found in Carbon (e.g., everything in HITheme.h, a less capable view model, less capable menu APIs, etc).

The cynic in me says that bits of Carbon like HITheme will probably just be made private, wrapped in an Obj-C API, and presented as the next big thing in 10.6...

-dair

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