Comment by deadnomore
16 hours ago
> This got me acquainted with the classic Mac OS,
> and I fell in love with the jank as it were (hacks
> upon hacks upon hacks going back to the 1980s is
> something I’d definitely describe as “jank”).
Modern macOS still has classic Mac OS code in it dating as far back, and has added Objective C and Swift abstractions on top.
Does it? I am pretty sure the entire Carbon stack is retired now.
Yeah I think you are right, I should say that some of that code was ported and still survives today in 26 uses some of the same APIs and naming, but isn’t necessarily the same code from classic Mac OS. One example is RegisterEventHotKey.
That surprises me; I assumed they dropped the last pre-Darwin code when they discontinued the classic environment. What remains that's that old?
I seem to recall years ago reading that the Cocoa (the NeXTstep derived API) menu code called into the Carbon (the classic Mac OS derived API) code to run stuff. But that was around Snow Leopard IIRC. That sort of stuff might still be around?
The Carbon API itself lasted until 10.15 (Catalina / 2019) for 32 bit apps, so there's presumably at least some classic Mac OS derived code in there until then.
Menus got moved away from Carbon on macOS 14.
You'll get this error if you try to use the Carbon menu APIs:
> References to Carbon menus are disallowed with AppKit menu system on macOS 14 and newer. Use instances of NSMenu and NSMenuItem directly instead
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...
Pretty sure the menu bar was Carbon in Snow Leopard, which was the same release that discontinued Classic. Lots of Cocoa widgets called into HIToolbox under the hood. QuickTime wasn't fundamentally changed. And iTunes of course was Carbon code for a very, very long time.
Most of the Security framework still dates from OS 9.
Is that so? Say more? Such fond memories of reading about Copland in MacAddict…. Then OS9…
1 reply →
Yes but mostly not. Modern MacOS is based off of NeXTSTEP OS from the NeXT acquisition, not classic.
But in the early days, a lot of UI and OS frameworks were based on Carbon stuff ported from Classic MacOS with Cocoa wrappers on them.
One sibling mentioned the menus. Another sibling mentioned the Security framework. The SDK for macOS Golden Gate still ships with headers dating back to MacOS 8.6 (although they are mostly deprecated now) https://kalleboo.com/linked/macos86security_vs_macosgoldenga...