Overview
Carbon consists of a broad set of functions for managing files, memory, data, the user interface, and other system services. It is implemented as any other API: in Mac OS X, it is spread over several frameworks (each a structure built around a shared library), principally Carbon.framework, ApplicationServices.framework, and CoreServices.framework, and in older Mac OS, it resides in a single shared library named CarbonLib.
As an umbrella term encompassing all C-language API procedures accessing Mac-specific functionality, Carbon is not designed as a discrete system. Rather, it opens nearly all the functionality of Mac OS X to developers who do not know the Objective-C language required for the broadly equivalent Cocoa API.
Carbon is compatible with all of the several executable formats available for PowerPC Mac OS. Binary compatibility between Mac OS X and previous versions requires use of a Preferred Executable Format file, which Apple never supported in their Xcode IDE.
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