Learning Cocoa Learning Carbon As Scott Forstall, Apple's director of application frameworks, said, having two complete APIs with their own implementation would be wasteful, and it's important to maximize reuse in the system. In addition, Carbon is a growing API that is still under active development. Each release will bring more new APIs that expose even more functionality. After Monday's presentations, it seemed to me that the right way to look at the two frameworks is not side by side as all of Apple's marketing material would indicate, but as Cocoa building on top of Carbon. When looked at this way, it becomes apparent that Carbon is the procedural native framework, and that Cocoa is the object-oriented native framework of OS X building on Carbon.
Developers are free to choose the level they want to program at.
Developers choosing to work within Cocoa have all of Carbon's goodies just waiting to be tapped. James Davidson is a Senior Engineer at CollabNet working on collaborative software development tools. Return to the Mac DevCenter . Comment on this Article Showing messages 1 through 19 of 19. Save dialogs are not Carbon, but Print Dialogs Are.