Carbon is a set of APIs for developing full-featured, high-performance, and reliable applications for Mac OS X. Carbon enables C, Objective-C and C++ developers to take advantage of Mac OS X-specific features, including an advanced user interface toolkit, an efficient event-handling mechanism, the Quartz 2D graphics library, and multiprocessing support. In addition, other industry-standard C and C++ APIs are easily available to Carbon developers, providing access to such services as the OpenGL drawing system, the Mach microkernel, and BSD operating-system services, and even the Cocoa framework. And you can use virtually any Macintosh development environment that supports Intel and PowerPC to build Carbon applications.

If you are already familiar with a C/C++ API, even if on another platform, Carbon simplifies porting your application to Mac OS X. Carbon provides access to the advanced features in the Macintosh operating system and hardware, and is continually being updated to support new Mac OS X technologies, so that you can upgrade your applications in step with innovative features as Apple releases new APIs. The Carbon APIs are also well-suited to cross-platform development. Major software vendors use Carbon to build some of the most popular commercial Macintosh applications.

You can use Apple's own IDE Xcode and Interface Builder, specifically designed for constructing applications on Mac OS X. Or you can use any of the third-party tools that support Intel and PowerPC to build Carbon applications. New applications should use Mach-O, Mac OS X's native executable format.

The Carbon framework contains thousands of functions, data structures, and constants. Related functions and data structures are organized into functional groups, usually referred to as managers or services. The managers include specific APIs for managing user interfaces, file access, text editing, and threads, to name a few. For example, the File Manager provides an API for application access to the file system, and Navigation Services provides an API for helping users navigate the file system.

Apple's Carbon is the essential building block for writing C, Objective-C and C++ applications that run on Mac OS X. You gain all the benefits of Mac OS X while using some of the simplest yet most capable C interfaces available. This combination makes it easier than ever to create world-class applications for this world-class operating system.

If you are ready to begin learning about the APIs and tools available on Mac OS X for Carbon, go to Getting Started With Carbon, for a guided introduction and learning path.

For news, updates and links to other ADC content related to Carbon Mac OS X, return to the Carbon topic page.

Updated: 2006-07-27