Re: When does Carbon completely?

On 23 Oct 2009, at 15:32, Uli Kusterer wrote:

> On 09.10.2009, at 11:43, Alastair Houghton wrote:

>> Generally speaking, things that are part of Carbon have the word  
>> "Manager" or "Toolbox" in their name (e.g. "File Manager",  
>> "Resource Manager", "High Level Toolbox"...).  QuickDraw is also  
>> part of Carbon, but doesn't have either of these words in its  
>> name.  The old QuickTime API *might* be considered to be part of  
>> Carbon too I suppose (though I tend to think of it as a separate  
>> thing).
>
>
> That's a bad rule to go by.

Well it wasn't supposed to be a hard and fast rule, but it *is* true  
that things with "Manager" or "Toolbox" on the end of their names are  
generally part of Carbon, and that there are other things that might  
be too...

> There's Icon Services, for one thing, which is also Carbon.

...Icon Services being a very good example.

> Carbon is whatever Apple defines Carbon to be.

Sure.  No argument there.  It *used* to be easier, because Carbon was  
just a library of APIs that let you write apps that ran on OS 9 and OS  
X, so it's was entirely clear what was and was not a part of it.

> Many things have changed, have become Carbon or have stopped being  
> Carbon (e.g. the CoreServices File Manager used to be the Carbon  
> file manager, and originally started out as a few additional  
> functions in Classic's File Manager).

You're right, Apple does seems to have subtly reworded the docs to  
make File Manager sort-of-not part of Carbon.  I hadn't even noticed  
they'd done that, though it does make some sort of sense I suppose  
given the amount of use it gets in many peoples' Cocoa programs and in  
the frameworks behind the scenes.

Anyway, the point was the Grand Central is most certainly *not* part  
of Carbon, nor does the mere existence of a C API make something part  
of Carbon.

Kind regards,

Alastair.

-- 
http://alastairs-place.net