> On Oct 4, 2019, at 4:51 AM, Jeremy Hughes via Cocoa-dev > <cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com> wrote: > > Hi Jens, > >> On 3 Oct 2019, at 20:04, Jens Alfke via Cocoa-dev <cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com >> <mailto:cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com>> wrote: >> >> The people I hear complaining about this are those who, like you, didn't >> move to Cocoa. Carbon was a _temporary_ transition API*. > > It wasn’t clear to us (outside Apple) that Carbon was a temporary API until > 2007, when Apple suddenly abandoned 64-bit Carbon.
Yes, they marketed Carbon as a first-class citizen, promoted as “the basis for all life,” and even rewrote the Finder and Dock—which already had Cocoa implementations from NeXT—in Carbon just to prove that they were serious about it. That last detail made a lot of people nervous about *Cocoa’s* future. There was a real possibility that it could have gone the way of OpenDoc or GX and joined the large graveyard of supposedly superior Apple technologies, whereas Carbon was the only framework being used by all the big clients that Apple couldn’t survive without, and for those first few years, it seemed to get a lot more development attention (Cocoa didn’t even support proper drag and drop until Jaguar). I still remember reading this thread, and feeling nervous about it: https://lists.apple.com/archives/cocoa-dev//2002/Jan/msg01366.html The common assumption among the more level-headed at the time was that Cocoa was going to be gradually rewritten to sit on top of Carbon, with Carbon sticking around as the lower-level, closer-to-the-metal API. They actually did partially do this—for example, I think that the menu system is still Carbon under the hood. In retrospect, it seems clear that the real issue driving things was that Apple in 2001 did not have the clout that they had in 2007. Apple was in a rather precarious position at the time, and was in no position to dictate terms to its large vendors like Adobe and Microsoft on whom it depended for its survival. If we had known the success that Apple would subsequently reach, we might have been able to predict that Carbon would eventually be phased out, but to those living in the moment, there was no guarantee that that would happen, or even that Apple would still be around after all this time (indeed, if the inevitability of this *had* been obvious, I would have loaded up on stock). Hindsight is easy. None of that makes it surprising that Carbon is gone in 2019, though (sadly, as I’m going to miss a lot of the game library that’s being wiped out by this). Charles _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
