Re: Carbon vs Cocoa
Re: Carbon vs Cocoa
- Subject: Re: Carbon vs Cocoa
- From: Peter Sichel <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 12:56:47 -0400
At 10:14 PM +0700 10/2/02, Robert Nicholson wrote:
What are the reasons why anybody would choose to right Carbon apps
over Cocoa. Is it because Carbon works under OS 9 with CarbonLib? Or
is it simply a matter of language
choice ie. Objective-C vs C++?
Why for instance are so many of Apples iApps written with the Carbon APIs?
This question has become somewhat contentious and political,
but a simple answer might be:
It is much easier to convert many existing Mac OS 9 applications to
Carbon than re-write them from the ground up in Cocoa. Thus Apple's
original advice on this subject was to convert existing apps using
Carbon and write new apps in Cocoa.
Since then, large developers with many years of investment in
the Classic Mac OS APIs have pressed Apple to make Carbon a
first class citizen under Mac OS X.
As I understand it, a minority of existing Mac developers have
fully switched to using Cocoa. As one of that minority, I see
two conflicting views:
(1) Cocoa is a more advanced application framework than anything
available under Carbon and allows developers to write about two
thirds less code.
(2) Objective-C is not widely accepted as a portable industry standard
making it more difficult for large developers to share common
code between Mac and Windows versions of their software.
If you have no previous investment in the Carbon APIs and are
not concerned about porting to Windows, I would use Cocoa.
If you want to learn and use the "best" Object Oriented framework
for the Mac (or any) platform consider Cocoa. Beyond this, the
business trade-offs get more complicated.
As for the future, again there are two conflicting views:
(1) The technology in Cocoa is so good that other frameworks
using C++ or its successor will gradually adopt it. Learning
these techniques now will have long term value.
(2) Apple will not change the industry to use Objective-C so it's
not worth the massive investment to re-write large apps.
C++ keeps getting better. It's too easy to get burned by Apple.
In the end, I think it becomes a business decision. You make
your best choice and then try to make it work.
- Peter
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