Re: Moribund Carbon...any thgouths

Kevin Walzer wrote:
> With Leopard's release, I'm taking another look at Tk Aqua's future.
        ...
> Although I know Apple has made no official statement about this, it
> sounds as if Carbon is in the process of being shifted to a legacy API:
> kept around, but not updated. The signals to shift to Cocoa couldn't be
> stronger. For me, this is ironic, because I'm learning C and Carbon so I
> can submit some patches to various bits of Tk that Daniel hasn't had
> time to work on.

I still find your notes more alarmist than practical in any sense.
Apple's changes over time need to be followed, but from reading various
articles, even Cocoa users weren't spared in Leopard, and Carbon is far
from singular to Tk.  From the Ars Technica article on Leopard:

"""
In Cocoa, deprecated APIs were simply not ported to 64-bit. The
Objective-C runtime is all-new for 64-bit, with a new ABI, faster
dispatching, zero-cost exceptions, and public APIs for introspection
built on top of newly opaque internal structures. All over Cocoa, ints
have been replaced with NSIntegers. In all of the graphics APIs, floats
have been replaced with CGFloats.

QuickTime also got the "Carbon treatment." The venerable plain-C API for
QuickTime is not available in 64-bit. The Cocoa QTKit library is the
only game in town for 64-bit QuickTime.

And on and on. With Leopard, Mac OS X's API future is clearer than it's
ever been. The future is Objective-C, Cocoa, 64-bit. Full stop, no
waffling, everyone get on board the train.

There's an inherent tension between developers with existing
applications and skillsets and the OS vendor's desire to attract new
blood and make good long-term decisions for the platform. The late call
on the 64-bit Carbon decision is clear evidence that Apple struggled
mightily with these issues internally.

In the end, Apple made the hard choice instead of the easy one. I think
it will pay off, though the short-term consequences could be pretty
grim. After all, just look at how long it's taking to get an
Intel-native version of Microsoft Office for the Mac. Should we expect a
64-bit Cocoa version in, say, 2012? And I have no idea what Adobe's
going to do about 64-bit versions of its products. That's many millions
of lines of Carbon code between those two companies alone. We may be in
for a rough patch, so buckle up.
"""

Jeff

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc.
Still grepping through log files to find problems?  Stop.
Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser.
Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/
_______________________________________________
Tcl-mac mailing list
tcl-mac@...
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tcl-mac