I was searching on the internet about porting applications from Mac OS X to Linux, and I saw that there was a project called Cocotron, which aims to implement Cocoa frameworks completely so that porting apps from Mac OS X to Windows or Linux would be as simple as a recompile.

What I'm wondering is if there is something similar for Carbon? The Carbon API is used in many, many, many applications and it would be great if there was a way to take that code and just recompile it to the Linux target.

With Cocoa, the APIs are already mostly available for Linux, there is just no binary loader interface to allow loading Mac OS X Cocoa apps on Linux. GNUstep and Cocotron allow recompiling to new targets near-unmodified Cocoa code...

Carbon API has been frozen for quite some time, and it is starting to be deprecated. Additionally, Carbon on OS X will not get 64-bit support. So, since it isn't a moving target, and there are a LOT of big name large applications out there in Carbon, being able to bring that to Linux by a simple recompile would be great. Especially if Linux could offer 64-bit support for the Carbon API when Mac OS X itself cannot....

Carbon itself was designed to have the backends replaced from underneath it, since it was written for Mac OS X and backported to Mac OS 8 and 9 so that developers would Carbonize their apps quickly...

In Linux, most of the toolkits that make up the functionality of the Carbon API exist, but the unifying API like Carbon doesn't exist. Since Carbon is a C/C++ API, I don't think that there will be hell to pay from developers for having apps use CarbonLib, since it isn't something crazy like Objective-C or C#...

TsaniApani wrote:

Carbonizing is sooo late-90's. Do you really want that fizzy sugar-water the rest of you life, or would you rather enter into the distortion-field and have the real-thing. Step up and partake some of the true Apple Kool-Aid. Otherwise, you will never keep up with the Jones's. What you need is the most bleeding-edge processor/OS/compiler/whatever. Stop emulating and experience the warm-and-fuzzy feeling of multi-touch. Pity how un-sexy your apps will be you cannot keep up with lastest computer-fashion.... See, you know how to party... Everybody's doing it, and next time it will only cost you 30%

Writing code in C is sooo late-90's! Bah! With CarbonLib, it would be far more likely that we could get a port of many of the Adobe Creative Suite applications, since nearly all of them are Carbon based.

And it isn't really emulating, it is API translation...