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I need to compile some program with either Cocoa or Carbon windowing system. I have a 10.6.8 Snow Leopard installed on a i386 (at least uname -a tells me this) system. I opened the system-profiler and selected > Software > Frameworks. There are listed among others:
CarbonCore
CarbonSound
Cocoa
Does that mean, I am free to choose?
math
Posted 2012-07-06T07:18:10.123
Reputation: 2 376
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Sort of - cocoa is the modern API for newer applications, and least with the latest versions of OS X, the preferred one.
Carbon is a legacy API, used in OS 8 and 9 and is depreciated with the upcoming OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion . Some applications for OS X however continued using the carbon API until recently - wikipedia states older versions of photoshop, itunes and final cut were coded with carbon, though modern versions are cocoa based.
As a developer, you should be using cocoa over carbon, since cocoa supports 64 bits and well, isn't obsolete. In this case picking cocoa over carbon is a good idea.
As a user, this should be transparent to you, but you'd be using what API your software uses, assuming its supported.
I am guessing however compiling for either should work.
Journeyman Geek
Posted 2012-07-06T07:18:10.123
Reputation: 119 122
Thanks, I didn't know that Cocoa and Carbon are APIs. I just recently managed to boot into 64bit and I will use Cocoa interface. – math – 2012-07-06T12:10:39.107