Transition To Cocoa
The transition to 64-bit Macintosh applications beginning with Mac OS X v10.5, released 26 October 2007, has brought the first major limitations to Carbon. Apple does not provide compatibility between the Macintosh graphical user interface and the C programming language in the 64-bit environment, instead requiring the use of the Objective-C dialect with the Cocoa API. Although Objective-C can provide significant advantages for code already written to take advantage of its object-oriented philosophy, the need to rewrite large amounts of legacy code has slowed the transition of Carbon-based applications, famously with Adobe Photoshop, which was eventually updated to Cocoa in April 2010.
This difficulty also extended to Apple's own flagship software packages, as iTunes and Final Cut Pro (as well as the features in the QuickTime engine which powers it) remained written in Carbon for many years.
Incidentally, although Final Cut Pro X has been fully rewritten as a 64-bit Cocoa application, it was missing a significant number of features found in the discontinued Carbon version. iTunes 10.4 was also rewritten as a 64-bit Cocoa application which was released on July 20, 2011.
Read more about this topic: Carbon (API)
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