Re: [platform-swt-dev] Hello

[Andre Weinand <weinand@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Greg,

> I'm curious to know more of the details behind why Carbon might be 
> preferable to Cocoa...

Here are some of the details:
- Using Cocoa via the Java bridge is very slow; Carbon is really fast.
  I have the SWT StyledText running on top of Cocoa and Carbon, and 
the speed difference
  is significant.
- Using Carbon from Java via JNI is stable and predictable; using 
Cocoa from Java is shaky
  and not predictable. I spend quite a few hours to get even simple 
things to work.
- SWT is a low-level widget library which needs access to low-level 
mechanisms of the platform;
  Cocoa is a high level-toolkit (and in some places more of a framework).
  I had a hard time to get some of SWT's low-level mechanisms right.
  Some Examples:
	- Cocoa's floating point coordinates and antialiasing
	- SWT XOR drawing mode
	- SWT applications control the event loop
- the fact that Cocoa can be used from Java directly is not an issue. 
Writing JNI stubs for
  Carbon toolbox functions is a no-brainer (I don't write any other code in C).


Don't get me wrong: Cocoa is one of the best toolkits available today 
and I would not want to use any other toolkit to develop a standalone 
application for MacOS X. However, Cocoa is not a good fit for 
implementing toolkits which have a lower level of abstraction than 
Cocoa. So for example I don't think that Cocoa would be of great help 
for implementing X11 on MacOS X.

--andre