Re: proof of cocoa superiority?
Re: proof of cocoa superiority?
- Subject: Re: proof of cocoa superiority?
- From: Brian Hill <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 15:20:32 -0500
On Saturday, June 9, 2001, at 12:56 PM, Rosyna wrote:
I think this should be reworded. All of OmniGroup's applications and
Mail DOES have a cocoa base, however I know OmniWeb, and Mail probably
does too, has Carbon parts to it. For example, the Plugin loader for
omniweb is carbon. Any aliases these apps may use are Carbon. I know
there is more, I just don't know the specific parts and would rather
not mention them in the chance the app doesn't use carbon for it.
All of this comparing Cocoa to Carbon is comparing apples to oranges. Or
more accurately Nuts and Bolts on the one hand, and pre-assembled
engines on the other.
Carbon is 'underneath' Cocoa all over the place on OSX 1.0. The menus
are 'actually' implemented in Carbon (IIRC) on OSX. Carbon is a named
set of functional compatibility APIs. The line between Carbon and other
named functional APIs on MacOS X is not well defined, nor does it have
to be, IMHO.
What's QuickTime, for example? Is it Carbon, or is it QuickTime (an API
all by itself). Better yet, who cares -- that's something for Apple
Marketing to worry about!
A more accurate comparison would be to compare Cocoa to PowerPlant or
MacApp. Maybe a better comparison would be to Swing or the Netscape
Portable Runtime (NSPR).
All three are abstraction frameworks that require a VM or set of Runtime
libraries. All are designed to run on any system that their
Runtimes/VM's have been ported to (such as Win32 or Solaris). Last I
checked, there had been some work on porting MacApp to Win32, so perhaps
it could start to be thought of in this way as well. (of course, I'm
ignoring static linking vs dynamic linking vs P-code (byte code) issues,
helper systems like the pbs, etc, but that's not important right now).
Brian
email@hidden
http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill
"Why? I came into this game for adventure - go anywhere, travel
light, get in, get out, wherever there's trouble, a man alone.
Now they've got the whole country sectioned off and you can't
move without a form. I'm the last of a breed."
-- Archibald "Harry" Tuttle, Rogue HVAC Repairman