1.1. Understanding When to Use Cocoa

Cocoa is not the only way of developing for OS X and is not always the best choice. This section will look at some of the alternatives and when they might be used. The choice of development framework is not always an either-or choice. You can mix Cocoa, Carbon, and other frameworks in the same application, with some limitations. You can also mix languages, developing the performance-critical parts of your application in C or Objective-C and the rest in a higher-level scripting language.

1.1.1. Carbon

Before Mac OS X, there was Classic MacOS (called Apple System for most of its life, and Mac OS for the last few releases). This dated back to 1984 and contained a lot of incremental updates along the way. It was ported from Motorola’s 68000 series architecture to Apple, IBM, and Motorola’s PowerPC and contained an emulator for running old code. The early PowerPC machines were slower than the fastest Motorola 68040 machines at the time because much of the operating system and most of the applications ran in emulation.