Carbon (API)

Carbon is a collection of application programming interfaces for the Macintosh operating system. Carbon was developed by Apple, to make it as easy as possible program developers to port their applications from Mac OS to Mac OS X.

Carbon is based on the programming interface of the classic Mac OS, minus those who are historically strong and redundant, and such, the typical Mac OS X features such as pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection stood in the way. Carbon programs run on Mac OS X and with the Carbon library and Mac OS 8.6 and Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, you can select the information window of an application, whether these Classic (Carbon ) will run mode (assuming you have a Mac with a PowerPC processor and the Classic environment is installed).

The native programming interfaces library of Mac OS X is called Cocoa. Also, iTunes and the front end of the Quicktime player for Mac OS 9, Mac OS X and Windows based on carbon, while for example the Safari browser for Mac OS X and Windows is based on Cocoa.

With the introduction of Mac OS X 10.6, which is a pure 64- bit operating system, the Carbon library has not been ported to 64- bit architecture. This means that applications that want to benefit from the 64 -bit architecture, you must migrate to Cocoa.