Carbon is one of Apple Inc.'s procedural application programming interfaces (APIs) for the Macintosh operating system. It provides C programming language access to Macintosh system services. Carbon provides a good degree of backward compatibility for programs to run on the now-obsolete Mac OS 8 and 9, however these systems are no longer actively supported since Apple released the final OS 9 update in December 2001.

Overview[link]

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.^[1]

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.

Evolution and backward compatibility[link]

Carbon was designed as a cleaner implementation of the preceding Macintosh API. As originally designed, Macintosh applications access data records and global variables within the operating system. These practices make programs more compact for primitive computers with scarce memory, but hinder the addition of features to the operating system. Carbon adds (and requires) more modern methods for manipulating this information, namely by calling accessor subroutines on opaque data types. The process of changing a program's syntax to use these functions is termed Carbonization. This makes the application file incompatible with operating systems prior to Mac OS 8.1 at least, although source compatibility is often possible using C preprocessor macros.

Other changes from the pre-existing API removed features which were conceptually incompatible with Mac OS X, or simply obsolete. For example, applications could no longer install interrupt handlers or device drivers.

Carbon was introduced in incomplete form in 2000, as a shared library backward-compatible with 1997's Mac OS 8.1. However, several versions passed before it was mature enough for general use, and late versions require Mac OS 8.6. It is generally necessary to establish the minimum CarbonLib and Mac OS versions when releasing a backward-compatible Carbon application. Versions of CarbonLib are not tied to particular versions of the operating system.

Today[link]

The development of Mac OS X APIs reflect that of the underlying operating system. Mac OS X is written mostly in C and Objective-C. In particular, Objective-C is ubiquitous in the human interface systems. With Mac OS X v10.5, after a transition where new elements of the Carbon interface specifically referred to the underlying Cocoa system, Apple identified Objective-C and Cocoa as the preferred interface to human interface services. Carbon access to various human interface services in the 64-bit operating environment is not available, and significant new features will not be added to the 32-bit Carbon interface.^[2] Most other parts of the system, which have less emphasis on Objective-C, are not so affected.

Finally, Apple has declared the Carbon APIs deprecated in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, which is to be released in summer 2012.

Transition to Cocoa[link]

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.^[3] 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,^[4] which was eventually updated to Cocoa in April 2010.

This difficulty also extended to Apple's own flagship software packages, as iTunes^[5] and Final Cut Pro (as well as the features in the QuickTime engine which powers it^[6]) remained written in Carbon for many years.

Incidentally, although Final Cut Pro X has been fully rewritten as a 64-bit Cocoa application, it is 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.

Architecture[link]

Carbon descends from the Toolbox, and as such, is composed of "Managers". Each Manager is a functionally-related API, defining sets of data structures and functions to manipulate them. Managers are often interdependent or layered.

Newer parts of Carbon tend to be much more object-oriented in their conception, most of them based on Core Foundation. Some Managers, such as the HIView Manager (a superset of the Control Manager), are implemented in C++, but Carbon remains a C API.

Some examples of Carbon Managers:

• File Manager — manages access to the file system, opening closing, reading and writing files.
• Resource Manager — manages access to resources, which are predefined chunks of data a program may require. Calls File Manager to read and write resources from disk files. Examples of resources include icons, sounds, images, templates for widgets, etc.
• Font Manager — manages fonts. Deprecated (as part of QuickDraw) since Mac OS X v10.4, in favor of Apple Type Services (ATS).
• QuickDraw — 2D graphics primitives. Deprecated since Mac OS X v10.4, in favor of Quartz 2D.
• Carbon Event Manager — converts user and system activity into events that code can recognise and respond to.
• HIObject — a completely new object-oriented API which brings to Carbon an OO model for building GUIs. This is available in Mac OS X v10.2 or later, and gives Carbon programmers some of the tools that Cocoa developers have long been familiar with. Starting with Mac OS X v10.2, HIObject is the base class for all GUI elements in Carbon. HIView is supported by Interface Builder, part of Apple's developer tools. Traditionally GUI architectures of this sort have been left to third-party application frameworks to provide. Starting with Mac OS X v10.4, HIObjects are NSObjects and inherit the ability to be serialized into data streams for transport or saving to disk.
• HITheme — uses QuickDraw and Quartz to render graphical user interface (GUI) elements to the screen. HITheme was introduced in Mac OS X v10.3, and Appearance Manager is a compatibility layer on top of HITheme since that version.
• HIView Manager — manages creation, drawing, hit-testing, and manipulation of controls. Since Mac OS X v10.2, all controls are HIViews. In Mac OS X v10.4, the Control Manager was renamed HIView Manager.
• Window Manager — manages creation, positioning, updating, and manipulation of windows. Since Mac OS X v10.2, windows have a root HIView.
• Menu Manager — manages creation, selection, and manipulation of menus. Since Mac OS X v10.2, menus are HIObjects. Since Mac OS X v10.3, menu content may be drawn using HIViews, and all standard menus use HIViews to draw.

Event handling[link]

The Mac Toolbox's Event Manager originally used a polling model for application design. The application's main event loop asks the Event Manager for an event using GetNextEvent. If there is an event in the queue, the Event Manager passes it back to the application, where it is handled, otherwise it returns immediately. This behavior is called "busy-waiting", running the event loop unnecessarily. Busy-waiting reduces the amount of CPU time available for other applications and decreases battery power on laptops. The classic Event Manager dates from the original Mac OS in 1984, when whatever application was running was guaranteed to be the only application running, and where power management was not a concern.

With the advent of MultiFinder and the ability to run more than one application simultaneously came a new Event Manager call, WaitNextEvent, which allows an application to specify a sleep interval. One easy trick for legacy code to adopt a more efficient model without major changes to its source code is simply to set the sleep parameter passed to WaitNextEvent to a very large value—on OS X, this puts the thread to sleep whenever there is nothing to do, and only returns an event when there is one to process. In this way, the polling model is quickly inverted to become equivalent to the callback model, with the application performing its own event dispatching in the original manner. There are loopholes, though. For one, the legacy toolbox call ModalDialog, for example, calls the older GetNextEvent function internally, resulting in polling in a tight loop without blocking.

Carbon introduces a replacement system, called the Carbon Event Manager. (The original Event Manager still exists for compatibility with legacy applications). Carbon Event Manager provides the event loop for the developer (based on Core Foundation's CFRunLoop in the current implementation); the developer sets up event handlers and enters the event loop in the main function, and waits for Carbon Event Manager to dispatch events to the application.

Timers[link]

In the classic Mac OS, there was no operating system support for application level timers (the lower level Time Manager was available, but executed timer callbacks at interrupt time, during which you could not safely make calls to most Toolbox routines). Timers were usually left to application developers to implement, and this was usually done by counting elapsed time during the idle event - that is, an event that was returned by WaitNextEvent when any other event wasn't available. In order for such timers to have reasonable resolution, developers could not afford WaitNextEvent to delay too long, and so low "sleep" parameters were usually set. This results in highly inefficient scheduling behavior, since the thread will not sleep for very long, instead repeatedly waking to return these idle events. Apple added timer support to Carbon to address this problem—the system can schedule timers with great efficiency.

Notes[link]

External links[link]

• Apple Developer Connection: Carbon

Professor Sartaj Kumar Sahni is an Indian computer scientist, now based in the USA, and is one of the pioneers in the field of data structures. He is a distinguished professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida.^[1]

Education[link]

Sahni received his B.Tech. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.^[2] Following this, he did his graduate studies at Cornell University, earning a Ph.D. in 1973 under the supervision of Ellis Horowitz.^[3]

Research and publications[link]

Sahni has published over two hundred and eighty research papers and written 15 textbooks.^[4] His research publications are on the design and analysis of efficient algorithms, data structures, parallel computing, interconnection networks, design automation, and medical algorithms.

With his advisor Ellis Horowitz, Sahni wrote two widely-used textbooks, Fundamentals of Algorithms and Fundamentals of Data Structures. He has also written highly-cited research papers on the NP-completeness of approximately solving certain optimization problems,^[5] on open shop scheduling,^[6] on parallel algorithms for matrix multiplication and their application in graph theory,^[7] and on improved exponential time exact algorithms for the subset sum problem,^[8] among his many other research results.

Awards and honors[link]

In 1997, Sahni was awarded the IEEE Computer Society's Taylor L. Booth Education Award^[9] and in 2003 he was awarded the IEEE Computer Society McDowell Award.^[10] Sahni was also awarded the 2003 Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award of the Association for Computing Machinery.^[11]

Prof. Sahni is a member of the European Academy of Sciences.^[12] He was elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1988,^[13] and of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1996;^[14] he is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.^[15] He is a Distinguished Alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.^[2]

Sahni was given the Honorary Professor Award of Asia University (Taiwan) in 2009.^[16]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Sartaj K. Sahni home page

This article contains Japanese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of kanji and kana.

Michio Kaku (加来 道雄, Kaku Michio^?, born January 24, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York of City University of New York, a co-founder of string field theory,^[1] a futurist, and a "communicator" and "popularizer" of science. He has written several books about physics and related topics; he has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film; and he writes extensive online blogs and articles. He has written two New York Times best sellers, Physics of the Impossible (2008) and Physics of the Future (2011). He has hosted several TV specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery Channel, and the Science Channel.

Early life and education[link]

Kaku was born in San Jose, California to Japanese immigrant parents. His grandfather came to the United States to take part in the clean-up operation after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake^{[citation needed]}. His father was born in California but was educated in Japan and spoke little English. Both his parents were put in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, where they met and where his two brothers were born.

At Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, Kaku assembled an atom smasher in his parents' garage for a science fair project.^[2] At the National Science Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he attracted the attention of physicist Edward Teller, who took Kaku as a protégé, awarding him the Hertz Engineering Scholarship. Kaku graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1968 and was first in his physics class. He attended the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. in 1972, and in 1972 he held a lectureship at Princeton University.

During the Vietnam War, Kaku completed his U.S. Army basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia and his advanced individual training at Fort Lewis, Washington.^[3] However, the Vietnam War ended before he was deployed as an infantryman.

Academic career[link]

Kaku became a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,^[4] and New York University.^[5] He currently holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York.^[6]

Kaku has had over 70 articles published in physics journals such as Physical Review, covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics.^[7] In 1974, along with Prof. Keiji Kikkawa of Osaka University, he authored the first papers describing string theory in a field form.^[8][9]

Kaku is the author of several textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory.

Popular science[link]

Kaku is most widely known as a popularizer of science.^[10] He has written books and appeared on many television programs as well as film. He also hosts a weekly radio program.

Books[link]

Kaku is the author of various popular science books.

• Hyperspace (1994)
• Beyond Einstein (with Jennifer Thompson) (1995)
• Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century^[11] (1998)
• Einstein's Cosmos (2004)
• Parallel Worlds (2004)
• Physics of the Impossible (2008)
• Physics of the Future (2011)

Hyperspace was a best-seller and was voted one of the best science books of the year by both The New York Times^[10] and The Washington Post. Parallel Worlds was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in the UK.^[12]

Radio[link]

Kaku is the host of the weekly, one-hour radio program Explorations, produced by the Pacifica Foundation's WBAI in New York. "Explorations" is syndicated to community and independent radio stations and makes previous broadcasts available on the program's website. Kaku defines the show as dealing with the general topics of science, war, peace, and the environment.

In April 2006, Kaku began broadcasting Science Fantastic on 90 commercial radio stations, the only nationally syndicated science program on commercial radio in the United States. It is syndicated by Talk Radio Network and now reaches 130 radio stations and America's Talk on XM. The program is formatted as a live listener call-in show, focusing on "futurology," which he defines as the future of science.^{[citation needed]} Featured guests include Nobel laureates and top researchers on the topics of string theory, time travel, black holes, gene therapy, aging, space travel, artificial intelligence, and SETI. When Kaku is busy filming for television, Science Fantastic goes on hiatus, sometimes for several months. Kaku is also a frequent guest on many programs, where he is outspoken in all areas and issues he considers of importance, such as the program Coast to Coast AM, where on 30 November 2007, he reaffirmed his belief that there is a 100% probability of extraterrestrial life in the universe.^[13]

Kaku has appeared on The Opie and Anthony Show a number of times, discussing popular fiction such as Back to The Future, Lost, and the theories behind time-travel that these and other fictional entertainment focus on.

Television and film[link]

Kaku has appeared in many forms of media and on many programs and networks, including Good Morning America, The Screen Savers, Larry King Live, 60 Minutes, Nightline, 20/20, Naked Science, CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, Al Jazeera English, Fox News Channel, The History Channel, Conan, The Science Channel, The Discovery Channel, TLC, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Colbert Report, The Art Bell Show and its successor, Coast To Coast AM, BBC World News America, The Opie & Anthony Show, The Covino & Rich Show, Head Rush, The Late Show with David Letterman, and Real Time with Bill Maher.

In 1999, Kaku was one of the scientists profiled in the feature-length film Me and Isaac Newton, directed by Michael Apted. It played theatrically in the United States, was later broadcast on national TV, and won several film awards.^{[citation needed]}

In 2005, Kaku appeared in the short documentary Obsessed & Scientific. The film is about the possibility of time travel and the people who dream about it. It screened at the Montreal World Film Festival and a feature film expansion is in development talks. Kaku also appeared in the ABC documentary UFOs: Seeing Is Believing, in which he suggested that while he believes it is extremely unlikely that extraterrestrials have ever actually visited Earth, we must keep our minds open to the possible existence of civilizations a million years ahead of us in technology, where entirely new avenues of physics open up. He also discussed the future of interstellar exploration and alien life in the Discovery Channel special Alien Planet as one of the multiple speakers who co-hosted the show, and Einstein's Theory of Relativity on The History Channel.

In February 2006, Kaku appeared as presenter in the BBC-TV four-part documentary Time which seeks to explore the mysterious nature of time. Part one of the series concerns personal time, and how we perceive and measure the passing of time. The second in the series deals with cheating time, exploring possibilities of extending the lifespan of organisms. The geological time covered in part three explores the ages of the earth and the sun. Part four covers the topics of cosmological time, the beginning of time and the events that occurred at the instant of the big bang.

On January 28, 2007, Kaku hosted the Discovery Channel series 2057. This three-hour program discussed how medicine, the city, and energy could change over the next 50 years.

In 2008, Kaku hosted the three-hour BBC-TV documentary Visions of the Future, on the future of computers, medicine, and quantum physics, and he appeared in several episodes of the History Channel's Universe series.

On December 1, 2009, he began hosting a 12-episode weekly TV series for the Science Channel at 10 pm, called Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible, based on his best-selling book. Each 30-minute episode discusses the scientific basis behind imaginative schemes, such as time travel, parallel universes, warp drive, star ships, light sabers, force fields, teleportation, invisibility, death stars, and even superpowers and flying saucers. Each episode includes interviews with the world's top scientists working on prototypes of these technologies, interviews with science fiction fans, clips from science fiction movies, and special effects and computer graphics. Although these inventions are impossible today, the series discusses when these technologies might become feasible in the future.^[14]

In 2010, he began to appear in a series on the website Gametrailers.com called Science of Games, discussing the scientific aspects of various popular video games such as Mass Effect 2 and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

Kaku is popular in mainstream media because of his knowledge and his accessible approach to presenting complex subjects in science. While his technical writings are confined to theoretical physics, his public speaking and media appearances cover a broad range of topics, from the Kardashev scale to more esoteric subjects such as wormholes and time travel. In January 2007, Kaku visited Oman. While there, he talked at length to select members of that country's decision makers. In an interview with local media, Dr Kaku elaborated on his vision of mankind's future. Kaku considers climate change and terrorism as serious threats in man's evolution from a Type 0 civilization to Type 1.^[15]

He is pictured in Symphony of Science's newest song (as of September 6, 2011), 'The Quantum World.'

On October 11, 2010, Michio Kaku appeared in the BBC program "What Happened Before the Big Bang" (along with Laura Mersini-Houghton, Andrei Linde, Roger Penrose, Lee Smolin, Neil Turok, and other notable cosmologists and physicists), where he propounded his theory of the universe created out of nothing.^[16]

Social policy advocacy[link]

Kaku has publicly stated his concerns over matters including the anthropogenic cause of global warming, nuclear armament, nuclear power and the general misuse of science.^[17] He was critical of the Cassini–Huygens space probe because of the 72 pounds (33 kg) of plutonium contained in the craft for use by its radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Conscious of the possibility of casualties if the probe's fuel were dispersed into the environment during a malfunction and crash as the probe was making a 'sling-shot' maneuver around earth, Kaku publicly criticized NASA's risk assessment.^[18] He has also spoken on the dangers of space junk and called for more and better monitoring. Kaku is generally a vigorous supporter of the exploration of outer space, believing that the ultimate destiny of the human race may lie in extrasolar planets; but he is critical of some of the cost-ineffective missions and methods of NASA.

Kaku credits his anti-nuclear war position to programs he heard on the Pacifica Radio network, during his student years in California. It was during this period that he made the decision to turn away from a career developing the next generation of nuclear weapons in association with Edward Teller and focused on research, teaching, writing and media.^{[citation needed]} Kaku joined with others such as Helen Caldicott, Jonathan Schell, Peace Action and was instrumental in building a global anti-nuclear weapons movement that arose in the 1980s, during the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

Kaku was a board member of Peace Action and on the board of radio station WBAI-FM in New York City where he originated his long running program, Explorations, that focused on the issues of science, war, peace and the environment.

His remark from an interview in support of SETI, "We could be in the middle of an intergalactic conversation...and we wouldn't even know.", is used in the third Symphony of Science installment "Our Place in the Cosmos".

Personal life[link]

Kaku is married to Shizue Kaku and has two daughters.^[19]

Bibliography[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Michio Kaku

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