[fpc-pascal] Mac losing Carbon support in 64bit Leopard

[Ingemar Ragnemalm]

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote:

> On 6/15/07, memsom <memsom at interalpha.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> Apaprently Troll Tech is unhappy as they use Carbon in their Qt port for
>> Mac OS X...
>>     
>
> Everyone is unhappy. Office, Photoshop, Adobe products, Firefox,
> wxWidgets, etc, are all based on Carbon.
>
> Actually to me it seams that Apple is the only entusiastic company
> about Objective C
>   
They have lured many younger developers into the Cocoa cage, but AFAIK 
the big players
are not there and are unlikely to go there since they need good 
cross-platform solutions
and can't afford rewriting everything over and over again.

> This is sad, but at the same time isn't the end of the world, because:
>
> * The transition to 64-bits will take time, so we have some years
> still where work can continue with Carbon
>
> * Even then 32-bits carbon apps will keep working normally on 64-bits computers
>
> * Until 64-bits GUIs are really needed we will already have some way
> of interfacing with Cocoa, which can be either supporting obj-c
> objects on Pascal or procedurizing the Cocoa API
>   
And

* Apple might decide to make 64-bit Carbon if enough big players are 
unhappy with the
situation.

If that happens (even if it only happens to the modern Carbon APIs like 
HIView etc)
then all is well and we can go on moving forward.

If it doesn't happen, if Apple insists that Objective-C is the only path 
into 64-bit, then a
third path will be needed, and I think that should be a strict 
cross-platform solution.
That will make the Mac interface diverge more than before, but if Apple 
does not open
better paths it will happen.

At the moment, I would like to see more detailed information about what 
is actually
officially depreciated, what non-ObjC interfaces are actually ported (CG 
for sure,
all low-level Unix stuff etc). There is a great confusion about what 
"Carbon" really
is. If Apple drops QuickDraw, old Menu Manager and other old APIs, but 
supports
the new APIs, I won't be happy about it but at least the time I spent 
learning the new
ways is not wasted.


/Ingemar