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Comment by EmielMols | Hacker News Reader

I have no specific experience with carbon but in almost (arguably) similar cases I've come across as a developer, I've found a better approach to look for a mechanism to allow for granular upgrades over time.

In this specific case I could imagine supporting both carbon and cocoa screens / logic at the same time, and begin conversion screen-by-screen or feature-by-feature.

In the end this might mean maintaining extra complexity to support both technologies, but protects you from the danger of having to implement a complet syst m to feature parity at once.

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Supporting Carbon isn't really an option, it was a technology designed to ease porting from OS9 to OSX. It's been deprecated for years, is 32 bit only and is being dropped completely after macOS 10.14 Mojave.

I think it would make more sense to slowly port the Windows version to Qt. And then when that process is complete, you get a Mac and a Linux version.

Depends what you mean by Carbon. If you mean "the UI parts of HIToolbox", then yes, Carbon is deprecated. If you mean Carbon in general, most parts of it have been ported to x64, and you wouldn't call that deprecated.

I believe at this point no incremental upgrade is possible, because Carbon is entirely deprecated and will not run on current Macs.

You could reimplement Carbon in Cocoa.

You’re so right, I’ll go grab the source code for both and work on that right away.

It’s so obvious - why has nobody done it before?

Carbon apps do run on current Macs, and on the current macOS (10.14). But that's the end of the line. Carbon is 32 bit only, and Apple has announced they are dropping 32 bit soon.

It's not actually. Only the UI parts of Carbon are deprecated:

"We are still planning to support the Carbon Event Manager and Text Input Sources, to name two mostly non-UI APIs. You might wonder, what about the Memory Manager, or the Alias Manager, or the Process Manager, or other lower-level managers? At this time, it looks like most, if not all, of the APIs provided by the ApplicationServices and CoreServices umbrella frameworks will still be available in 64-bit." - Eric Schlegel (apple developer)

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