[lord vader]

I just read the whole thing on how mac os x is going to the intel prosessors. I was just getting into programming and was about to learn carbon and cocoa. If Apple goes with this whole Intel thing how will this affect the future of programming on mac? Will it do any good to learn carbon? I am just worried what i am going to do, stick with carbon, or have to wait until they come up with come up with some new api?

I guess what i am asking is when apple makes the switch what will happen to carbon, cocoa, ext.

[Chuckit]

Cocoa was always intended to be cross-platform, and if they've been compiling OS X on Intel for five years, that means Carbon is fine with the switch too (after all, Finder is Carbon). If you're just learning to program, though, I'd recommend Cocoa. Carbon is much more confusing, in my opinion.

[lord vader]

So then carbon and cocoa will not be affected in any way with the switch? It will all be the same?

[Angus_D]

Read http://developer.apple.com/documenta...versal_binary/

[Chuckit]

I thought that was a little heady for someone who hasn't actually started programming yet.

[ahvetm]

What I really wondered, learning the exciting news of Apple's Intel ambitions, was how all this will affect the gaming situation for mac. First, though I'm not a programmer, I suspect it will be a lot less work making PC games Mac-compatible in this situation... or what do you thinnk?
Second, provided hardware companies wanna make drivers for the purpose, there's a possibility for having OS X on custom built PC's - that is, finally an interesting and worthy adversary of windows for the gaming computers?
I'd like to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Erik Madsen,
Århus, Denmark

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by ahvetm

What I really wondered, learning the exciting news of Apple's Intel ambitions, was how all this will affect the gaming situation for mac. First, though I'm not a programmer, I suspect it will be a lot less work making PC games Mac-compatible in this situation... or what do you thinnk?

There have been some other threads about this. Game porters don't think it will make that big a difference, since the big problem porting games is redoing all the Microsoft-specific APIs, not so much endian problems.

Originally Posted by ahvetm

Second, provided hardware companies wanna make drivers for the purpose, there's a possibility for having OS X on custom built PC's - that is, finally an interesting and worthy adversary of windows for the gaming computers?

If they want to illegally crack the ROM and probably violate the licensing terms for OS X Intel.

[fromthecloud]

You won't be able to have OS X on non-Mac Intel PC's. Period. That is suicide for Apple. Apple has always been, and will always be a hardware company. That is where they make their money.

Phil Schiller was quoted today that Windows will be able to be run on the new Intel-based Macs, however. It just simply won't be supported by Apple, obviously.

[driven]

I'm not even sure it's a good idea to allow windows to boot on the box without running under OS/X. You don't need people booting into windows to run "this one app" and then staying over there in Windows. Emulation yes, wholesale booting, no.

(But I'm not as smart as the folks who run Apple .... so I'll sit back and watch ... and hopefully learn.)

[fromthecloud]

Originally Posted by driven

I'm not even sure it's a good idea to allow windows to boot on the box without running under OS/X. You don't need people booting into windows to run "this one app" and then staying over there in Windows. Emulation yes, wholesale booting, no.

(But I'm not as smart as the folks who run Apple .... so I'll sit back and watch ... and hopefully learn.)

In terms of making money, Apple really shouldn't care what OS you run (well, that's not quite true ) as long as you buy their hardware. When you buy their hardware, you pay for the hardware (which Apple will make a very shiny penny on) and you pay for a license of OS X. So at that point, you've bought everything, why should they care if you use it?

But, Apple is obviously banking on the fact that the average consumer will buy a Mac and fall in love with OS X, and not want to install Windows.

[lord vader]

Back to my question, i really dont understand all thats it talks about in that document from apple. What i really need to know is are they going to keep the old APIs the same or are they going to redo them. Should i even bother with corbon or cocoa? I what should i do as a new developer?

[Person Man]

Originally Posted by lord vader

Back to my question, i really dont understand all thats it talks about in that document from apple. What i really need to know is are they going to keep the old APIs the same or are they going to redo them. Should i even bother with corbon or cocoa? I what should i do as a new developer?

The APIs will stay the same.

Most people will recommend that as a new developer, you should go with Cocoa, as you get a lot of good stuff "for free" that you have to specifically code into your apps if you use Carbon.

[Chuckit]

The APIs should mostly stay the same. Not only is there no real reason to change the APIs, Apple definitely doesn't want to break everybody's code.

And the reason for starting out with Cocoa is more than just what you get "for free." Carbon is really big and pretty confusing, with a lot of old legacy stuff from the old Mac Toolkit left in. Cocoa is much simpler and better organized, and it shields you from a lot of the more low-level things that Carbon often forces you to consider, like whether you have enough memory allocated to a buffer to hold an indirect return value. Carbon is getting better, but Cocoa is just less intimidating.

[I was David B.]

Originally Posted by lord vader

I was just getting into programming and was about to learn carbon and cocoa.

Learn Java instead.

[fromthecloud]

Originally Posted by I was David B.

Learn Java instead.

Noooooo!

[driven]

I actually really like Java. :-)

(Of course I make a living coding in C# now on .NET) :-(

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by I was David B.

Learn Java instead.

[lord vader]

Thanks for all the help guys. I dont mind learing carbon even if it is hard I am up to the challenge. Besides, I am the kind of person who likes to know all the inner workings of stuff. So all that "free stuff" in cocoa is stuff i would like to learn.

[driven]

Given the choice I'd vote for Cocoa as well. Are there even books for Carbon any more?
Will Carbon be able to run (without emulation) on the Intel boxes?

[Angus_D]

Originally Posted by driven

Will Carbon be able to run (without emulation) on the Intel boxes?

Yes.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by driven

Will Carbon be able to run (without emulation) on the Intel boxes?

Since Cocoa uses Carbon for a lot of its GUI functionality, it had better!

[cheerios]

Cocoa is better for OSX coding.
I highly suggest it, rather than carbon. believe me there's plenty of things that you DON'T get for free to keep you busy there's more references, it's the 'main' dev language for the platform, it's the language the frameworks are in... it's just better to go that way.

as for the pdf... it says a lot of things, most of which boil down to 'be a good citizen, dont' make assumptions about the way memory is laid out.'

[parallax]

Originally Posted by lord vader

Thanks for all the help guys. I dont mind learing carbon even if it is hard I am up to the challenge. Besides, I am the kind of person who likes to know all the inner workings of stuff. So all that "free stuff" in cocoa is stuff i would like to learn.

Hehe, I felt the same exact way when starting to code on OS X not having done /too/ much Carbon-based coding on OS 9. But in retrospect, I don't feel that Carbon is really more "low level" than Cocoa. Anyway, Objective-C is a beautiful language in my opinion.

Plus Cocoa apps render better and NSTextView is way cool.

(Oh, and another vote for "don't do Java").

[itistoday]

Java's a beautiful language (my fav). I've tried objective C but for me it's too much of a pain. The way it sends messages is unnatural (using brackets instead of dots), so chaining messages looks very confusing (something like: [[[[NSString asdf] doSomething] [asdfsadf asdf]]] alloc] init]). I also don't like having to deal with memory management (using the retain and release methods, and knowing which classes retain objects given to them and which don't). Plus Java can call native code (think Carbon) as well using the Java Native Interface (JNI). And of course you get the added advantage that it'll run on any system without a recompile or any tweaking (even when Apple switches to Intel).

The only real downfall that java has is that on OS X it's really slow compared to other OS's. (And people complain about the GUI, but that's all bull because you have so many options, like actually using Cocoa with java to have real Cocoa GUIs, or using SWT, etc).

However, if you still don't want to go with Java then I would recommend Cocoa/Objective-C because it is most supported by Apple. It has the largest feature set really, it's fast, it's object oriented, and it is low level since you can use C in it without a problem.

[driven]

Java was meant to fix many of the issues with C++ (and by default, Objective C).

That said: If you want to use Cocoa I'd still recommend Obj-C.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by driven

Java was meant to fix many of the issues with C++ (and by default, Objective C).

What do you mean, "and by default, Objective-C"? How can a language default to fixing issues in Objective-C?

[lord vader]

I'll end up learning both carbon and cocoa. So i dont think it really matters what one i learn first.

[cheerios]

Originally Posted by driven

Java was meant to fix many of the issues with C++ (and by default, Objective C).

That said: If you want to use Cocoa I'd still recommend Obj-C.

note: Obj-C is NOT C++ based, it's C-based, as is C++. I don't know if I agree with your assessment of Java's purpose, but the Objective-C comment is definitely not true, whether or not the rest is.

[driven]

Originally Posted by cheerios

note: Obj-C is NOT C++ based, it's C-based, as is C++. I don't know if I agree with your assessment of Java's purpose, but the Objective-C comment is definitely not true, whether or not the rest is.

I didn't say that Obj-C was based on C++. I implied that it was an object oriented version of C, and as such inherits some of the things from C, such as pointers, lack of garbage collection, etc.

You don't have to agree with my assessment of Java's purpose. James Gosling himself said as much. :-) Since he authored the language I'm not going to argue with his motivations.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by driven

I didn't say that Obj-C was based on C++. I implied that it was an object oriented version of C, and as such inherits some of the things from C, such as pointers, lack of garbage collection, etc.

You said Java was designed to fix flaws in C++ "and, by default, Objective-C." Even if you didn't mean to, this implies that Objective-C comes from C++. I think it's worth correcting so as not to give people the wrong impression.

Objective-C is very different from C++. While neither of them is automatically garbage collected, they have totally different memory management schemes (C++'s is very close to C, whereas Objective-C uses a concept of ownership that is more similar to garbage collection). It's not really fair to lump them together like that.

[driven]

Sorry if you mis-interpretted me, and sorry if I left that impression ... but thank you for the clarrifcation. I meant that C++ inherited some of the issues that were problematic with C, and by default so did Objective C. The memory management issues are no better in C than they are in C++.

Objective C is better, no doubt .... but it's far too easy to make mistakes and cause memory leaks in Objective C as well.

[cheerios]

I stand corrected on Java's purpose in life, although that's still not what i would think of it as...just a C++ replacement. :shrug: The memory management is a bit wonky, but it could be much worse.

edit: just found this n the cocoa-dev mailing list today...

Just to throw something almost relevant into the mix:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/seanl/stuff/java-objc.html
;-)