Talk:Carbon (API)

Full stop in "toll free bridging"
Indeed a full stop is not in "toll free bridging," but American English suggests that there should be a period immediately before the closing quotation mark. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.227.67.1 (talk • contribs) 01:01, July 16, 2005 (UTC)


 * yes, but the Wikipedia Manual of Style overrides it. reverting the page. &mdash; boredzo (&#x270d;) 08:12, July 16, 2005 (UTC)

Yes and the Wikipedia manual is chauvinistic and moronic. Thank you. The sky is blue. If you have us.wikipedia and uk.wikipedia and ca.wikipedia and au.wikipedia and za.wikipedia and nz.wikipedia then you can so what you want - with us.wikipedia only of course. Stop running over other cultures far superior to yours the way you run over the middle east and latin america. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.5.14.123 (talk) 13:21, 19 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Ah, thanks. You should have linked to that rather than the "full stop" page in your summary. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.227.67.1 (talk • contribs) 06:30, July 16, 2005 (UTC)

Code name?
It says that Carbon is a codename -- isn't it the official name? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.224.184.255 (talk • contribs) 21:57, December 4, 2005 (UTC)

Carbon from Quicktime?
Gwernol, thanks for the addition - I must say it surprised me, I had never heard that tidbit before. Do you have a source to cite and maybe find more information? MFNickster 03:53, 6 March 2006 (UTC)


 * No official citation, but I was one of the engineers working on QuickTime at the time, so this is from first-hand experience. I'll see if I can find any official mention of this though. Gwernol 03:58, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I'd really like to see something about the early history of Carbon, since it seems to have basically produced the easy binaries that can cleanly run in both the old-style OS and a newer one that years of effort by everything from Pink through Copland to early designs for the Yellow Box never accomplished. 72.235.10.142 (talk) 03:03, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

POV in Overview section?
The "something old Mac developers knew next to nothing about" strikes me as judgemental in the context. It might be just a poor phrasing, so I'm not applying the editbat on it yet. 213.162.65.17 16:06, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

As of the current time the paragraph which begins "Carbon is sometimes seen as a transitional or legacy technology. This is incorrect..." is one big piece of misleading and zealous POV. Carbon is an API whose clear purpose was to provide a platform to transition classic Mac OS apps to Mac OS X, and it now has the status of a legacy technology, most obviously because of Apple's decision to stop development on the 64-bit Carbon API even when major application vendors like Adobe were relying on it to make a 64-bit release of their software. The Mac Dev Center page no longer mentions Carbon in the overview of the mac dev platform technologies. 92.233.195.172 (talk) 07:17, 21 May 2009 (UTC)


 * You are right that the article is currently POV, but you are also expressing a zealous POV attitude. I think things will work out best if the article just cites Apple as much as possible. Really, getting upset over who writes in what language is like something out of Star Trek or Dr Suess. I tried to clean up the lead, which wasn't as POV but is more visible. Potatoswatter (talk) 20:45, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Cocoa Vs. Carbon
Could someone write a very detailed explanation of the difference between Cocoa and Carbon, and how they compare and contrast? I don't know much in that field. I think it would benefit people reading this article, especially if they are choosing one. Maybe make a "Differences between Cocoa and Carbon" page sometime? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Geek 2.0 (talk • contribs) 01:24, 29 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Check Apple's documentation. You don't need to commit to one or the other for an entire program. Probably the current recommendation is to use mainly a mix of Cocoa and POSIX. Carbon is a bit of a compromise between the "pure OO" and "pure procedural UNIX" paradigms, and is seen by many as legacy. Potatoswatter (talk) 03:48, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Not very encyclopedic
This sentence, while you could argue that it is informative, isn't very encyclopedic. "Carbon is one of five APIs that may be accessed from a Mac OS X program; the others are Cocoa, POSIX, X11, and Java (POSIX is a Standard, X11 a WM Server and Java a language, none of these are API's. And Cocoa is more like a framework actually)."

It says something and then immediately contradicts/corrects itself. While I am a programmer, I tend to stay as far away from Apple as possible, so I don't really know what Carbon and Cocoa are, otherwise I would fix it myself.

--Alpha456 (talk) 22:14, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Whether it's technically correct or not, comments like that belong on the talk page rather than inserted into the article text; I've deleted it. Little Professor (talk) 18:26, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

External links modified
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Proposed merge of Multiprocessing Services into Carbon (API)
This seems to be a component of Carbon API, so it would make sense to merge it. I don't think there are enough reliable secondary sources for the Multiprocessing Services article to pass WP:NCORP or WP:GNG. MarioGom (talk) 16:33, 16 May 2022 (UTC)


 * I thought the article passed WP:GNG, but I'm not experienced with adding substantial content to Wikipedia, so I defer to you about the notability concern. In addition to the notability concern, I think the merger also makes sense based on the short length of the article I had made. Can a merger be done at any time, or is the process like deleting an article where it might take several weeks before it can happen? huntertur (talk) 17:58, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * The process for merges is more lax. If you agree with the merge, you can go ahead and do it by adding content from Multiprocessing Services to Carbon (API), and then replace the Multiprocessing Services page with a redirect . Best, MarioGom (talk) 14:33, 30 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I don't think a merge is right here, as the article also discusses aspects unrelated to Carbon. So there's no clear merge target. Ovinus (talk) 01:59, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Would agree; Carbon was a transition layer to run Mac OS 9 apps on Mac OS X, and Multiprocessing Services are also a Mac OS 9 feature, so it would be detrimental to merge it into Carbon, which is Mac OS X-exclusive. DFlhb (talk) 21:41, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I think there were implementations of the Carbon API atop both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, as well as code to run Carbon apps in Preferred Executable Format (PEF) under Mac OS X, so you could compile code for Mac OS 9 into a PEF binary and have the same binary run on both OSes. (The Mac OS 9 implementation probably didn't pick up any features added to Carbon for Mac OS X, and may not have included all features that the initial Mac OS X implementation did.)
 * However, unless there was an implementation of Multiprocessing Services atop Mac OS X APIs, Carbon be of less use for programs using Multiprocessing Services, as the binaries of those programs wouldn't run on Mac OS X. Guy Harris (talk) 08:40, 24 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Looks like I forgot to reply. You were right on both counts, my bad; Carbon runs on OS 9 and supports Multiprocessing Services (with limitations) on OS X. DFlhb (talk) 16:11, 19 July 2023 (UTC)