> If you see Cocoa as more of a pain than Carbon, that's just the
> learning curve you're looking at. It is much, much more efficient for
> writing GUI code than HLTB. (I spent 12 years programming the Classic
> OS, then learned Cocoa and never looked back.)
>
> I don't see why the cross-platform issues are any greater. Both Carbon
> and Cocoa are Mac-specific APIs. Both of them can call into cross-
> platform code just fine. If your cross-platform code base is in C++,
> just use Objective-C++ (.mm files) for your Cocoa code and it can work
> with C++ without any problems. (The last project I did for my previous
> employer was cross-platform and involved just this kind of setup, with
> cross-platform C++ interfaced to Obj-C.)
Ok, I *really* don't want to go into a discussion about this, because I know how such discussions can evolve (and it's not always pretty :-)).
What I will do however, is try to answer your question, and explain my point-of-view. If you have any questions, please ask, but let's not get into an argument about this, ok?
The way I code plug-ins is that I have as few OS calls as possible. Everything is rendered to a buffer, which is then "bitblittet" to the screen. This means that in order to support any given platform, I generally need the following:
1: Some way to paint my buffer in the window
2: Some way to react on mouse and keyboard messages
3: Some non-gui stuff, like file handling
That's it. There's some details and variants, but I don't think there's any reason to go into this.
So, you see, I've done this for carbon, and I won't have to do it again for any project. Except that I need to do it in cocoa now, so already here it's extra work.
But it's more than that (and please excuse me if I'm wrong in the following, because I'm just starting to look into this): First I need to learn obj-C, in order to implement the view. Then I need some way for that view to communicate with my C++ code. Then that C++ code need to communicate with some other cocoa code, because drawing functions no longer are support in carbon.
So, basically I'll be using a fair amount of time setting up a system which translates from A to B to A, and I even have to learn language A... all this, just to be able to do what I'm already doing.
Do you see what I mean? There's absolutely no gain for me in cocoa, only extra work. Nothing of what I do on a daily basis uses the OS calls, so it doesn't matter if they're a hassle... If they are an obstacle, then they're an obstacle that I've already crossed..
I hope this makes sense...
All the best,
Michael Olsen
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