“At last year’s WWDC, Steve Jobs announced that Leopard would support 64-bit computing across the board: not only on the Unix command line as in Tiger, but also in Carbon and Cocoa. But… During yesterday’s keynote, Jobs only mentioned Cocoa would get the 64-bit treatment, with Carbon missing in action. Carbon is the Application Programmer Interface (API) that made the transition from OS 9 to OS X possible, and although it’s not the latest and greatest (that would be Cocoa), Carbon is still holding its own—even Apple uses it to power some of its own applications. Sources tell Ars that not mentioning Carbon was no oversight: apparently, Apple has decided to scrap the intended 64-bit support in Carbon,” Iljitsch van Beijnum reports for Ars Technica.
“Although we can still look forward to 64-bit Cocoa applications in Leopard, this development means that third-party developers, especially those with cross-platform products, will be less inclined to support 64-bit computing in their applications. Doing so would require removing all references to Carbon,” van Beijnum reports.
Full article here.
More about Mac OS X Leopard’s 64-bit technology: http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/technology/64bit.html
Out with the old and in with the new.
C’mon developers use current tools and adjust!
Ask Algore. He has lots of credits for carbon footprints.
i like carbon
Problem with Cocoa, at least in its current form, is that pretty much all coca apps seem to be massive RAM hogs. Adium which is a fairly lightweight IM client can swell to 70MB after a while not to mention iPhoto which is a more bloated cocoa app and can easily get to 250MB or so. Compared to iTunes which still remains Carbon AFAIK and generally only uses about 30MB, and the Carbon Finder which stays at about 10MB of RAM.
Hopefully improved memory management in Leopard will fix some of this but theres no denying that Apple are getting obsessed with memory wasting. However since Carbon apps generally are lightweight on RAM there shouldnt really be any need for 64 bit carbon if 32 bit binaries are compatible with the 64 bit OS. I’m no expert though.
It’s OK i prefer Cocoa Puffs anyway. This carbon stuff tastes like crap.
that latest joy of tech I think is dead on
Surely not every application needs to be 64bit..???
Only the most powerful and intensive stuff is really going to benefit from it.
After all, no-one complains at an endless wait for a song to play in iTunes do they?
anyway that carbon stuffs not that great ……while Cocoa is worth at least 4 or 5 BOOM’s to Steve.
Well perhaps developers should try to code for Windows where they would have to develop a seperate 32bit and 64bit application (including whatever drivers are necessary).
It seems to me that if a developer is going to migrate to 64bit, why use old technology? Regarless, isn’t Cocoa the only real environment to code Universal Aps??? (or am I wrong on that?)
…he didn’t mention the blackened snapper either …really disappointed
C’mon developers use current tools and adjust!
Harder to do than you think. A lot of APIs are still stuck in Carbon. And you speak as if man hours are freely available. But feel free to think of all Mac developers as lazy and resistant to change.
I actually think this is yet another Apple dig at Adobe.
I’m a coco krispy’s kinda guy myself.
We will finally be a totally carbon based life form.
Or, er, uh – That is, a totally cocoa based life form – that will be good as long as its with nuts.
Any word if Leopard supports Classic?
carbon hogs memory. and that is on a *nix system, which means it already uses memory aggressively. if Apple shifts everything to cocoa, we get a performance increase. simple as that.
MW: if everything “ran” on cocoa, i wouldn’t mind a bit.
I think it’s important to remember that some apps that have been transitioned from OS 9 are so large that it’s unlikely that they’ll ever become fully cocoa. What about programs like Photoshop?
At least Windows has had 64 bit support for years. One day maybe Mac OS X will catch up. Probably at version Mac OS XI Vista.
@ macboy2010
“that latest joy of tech I think is dead on”
Abso-bloody-lutely.
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/index.html
No64BitForYou,
“At least Windows has had 64 bit support for years. One day maybe Mac OS X will catch up. Probably at version Mac OS XI Vista.”
Oh, go blow it.
As long as it’s not Cocoa Chanel.
Carbon seems so dated……
MW:returned
Free ChrissyOne. I just read that her I.P. address has been blocked by MDN because of the moronic eunuchs who were flaming this site using her handle. Come on, MDN. What the hell?
TowerTone? TMF? Where are you guys?
m.w. = “moral” And the moral of the story is, it’s time for MDN to force people to create accounts here.
And Cocoa can be a real gorilla.
aka Christian: TMF is camping out for an iPhone. There are lots of s’mores and ghost stories of extension conflicts past. Oooh, scary!
I will relay that message to TowerTone, who is still at a retreat in the Ouachitas battling a brutal Enzyte/Viagra/Ice addiction brought on by a condition known as Bigger-Faster-Harder Syndrome.
classic? har har he said classic to funny
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No64BitForYou,
How many spambot emails go through your Vista system at 64bit per night?
Thanks for running a crappy OS that empowers crooks and criminals and has ruined the Internet… thanks again Moron!
Re: Free ChrissyOne
An IP address has nothing to do with a person’s handle.
Until most Cocoa applications are recompiled with Objective C 2.0, they will continue to “eat up” memory as the current version of the Objective C compiler doesn’t support garbage collecting.
Given that Carbon was created to help transition applications from OS 9 to OS X, it’s about time to make the move to a completely Cocoa environment and drop the legacy crap. Hopefully, by the time OS X 10.6 is released, Carbon will be no more.
The really big issue here is that FCP6 is still a carbon app along with the Adobe crowd. Now you could say that Adobe is dragging their feet (so is Apple’s Pro app department), but these are the programs that really benefit from 64 bit and not integrating 64-bit carbon hurts. And I’m not dissing Adobe or Apple Pro Apps programmers cause they have a few million lines of code to write and are only two years into it. My gripe is why can’t I have the fruit from the forbidden tree now and have it get even better down the road when everything is cocoa?
I don’t like having to wait days for a project to render out when it could take twelve hours through an efficient 64 bit distributed processing rig. Ever try to distribute processes in 32 bit? It takes longer than if you just used one machine.
“Surely not every application needs to be 64bit..???”
Well, they should be. Keep in mind that you’re going to end up with problems when you have 16GB of RAM and you run a bunch of apps. Those apps will all have to live in the 4GB space. So even if you have tons of memory, if all your apps are not 32-bit happy, you’ll have problems.
Of course, Apple may use some of the upper memory as a swapfile for these unfortunate applications. That might help a bit…
this is completely normal and unavoidable.
Carbon is 32 bits, if Apple makes the old carbon API 64 bits, most apps just would not compile (even if C is supposed to be word size independent)
why, in 2007, do we still have to develop code for just one OS ?
no user benefits at all, i just don’t accept this anymore, it’s just a way to have control, stop that
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rumor: coming soon: a new OS that free’s users, and developers from all those limitations.
computers have been able to do better for years, software company’s are just doing their best to screw us.
http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/ada/
FIRST
Some interesting comments on this on Michael Tsai’s site:
http://mjtsai.com/blog/2007/06/13/64-bit-carbon/
I’m too busy having barbecue sauce poured all over me, and being worked like a rib.
” . . . and being worked like a rib.”
I’ve got no beef with that kind of pork.
Now is Leopard going to run on PowerPCs?
toby:
Excerpt from wikipedia:
“(Leopard) Compatibility
Like Mac OS X 10.4, Leopard will be available for both PowerPC and Intel Macs. While it is known that Leopard will support PowerPC G4 and PowerPC G5 processors, support for the PowerPC G3 is reportedly not present in the pre-release versions which have been made available to developers. When Apple’s Leopard website first appeared online, the 64-bit section stated, “From G3 to Xeon, from MacBook to Xserve, there is just one Leopard.” The sentence was removed from the page the following day, leaving open the question of whether Leopard will support Macs with G3 processors. In the past, each new major release of Mac OS X has dropped support for at least some older Macs; 10.3 dropped support for Macs without built-in USB ports, and 10.4 dropped support for computers without FireWire ports.
Documentation contained with the Developer Preview DVD states that a PowerPC G4, G5, or Intel processor is a minimum requirement. Despite this, some users have managed to install the developer preview version of Leopard on Macs with G3 processors by editing a particular file and then creating a new installation DVD with this edited file. However, even though these installations of Leopard can be installed on G3 Macs, some applications (for example Safari and iChat) will not run. It is not known whether this will be possible with the final shipping version of Leopard.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.5#Compatibility)
Cocoa means a certain style of programming with certain APIs and languages only available on Mac, which are quite different from the mainstream, so adopting it for multiplatform development isn’t economically sound: requires maintaining two radically different codebases.
Plus Cocoa is not the Holy Grail of OS X development many believe it to be: its APIs have their own large sets of deficiencies, and many Cocoa gaps are actually covered by invoking Carbon APIs (which means some of those will have to go 64 bits necessarily). Cocoa, also, doesn’t guarantee faster code at all. As it has been said before, many Apple Pro Apps are Carbon-based. Even Apple has been promoting Carbon as a first class citizen.
Carbon, for OS X, is sort of “everything C or C++-based that is not Cocoa”, which happens to be the most typical style of coding in the world, and the one behind all the most brilliant apps that have arrived to OS X from the Windows and Unix world (or even created on Macs from the start), such as graphics apps, 3d ones, video editing and compositing apps, and, by the way, games. There are 64 bit versions of several 3D apps in the Windows and Unix world waiting to be ported to Carbon 64.
So now what? Do we just lose them?
But the trruly incredible thing is that, judging by some developers’ reactions in the very Apple dev forums, Carbon 64 was actually in a very advanced state of development. Even more, these same developers were following Apple’s guidelines to transition to 64 bitness, including moving from some sets of Carbon APIs to other ones, the ones that would go 64 bit in Leopard. Many feel backstabbed, some of them actually were ready to start betatesting their Carbon 64 apps.
Apple must clarify all this to the detail, and above all it must NOT repeat the same Rhapsody mistake and try to enforce Cocoa as the only 64 bit approach: it would make OS X really irrelevant as a 64 bit workstation for off the shelf creative app packages.