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Can someone tell me what's the difference between Cocoa and Carbon? I want to download Eclipse but I don't know which one to pick, I have option to choose Cocoa or Carbon.

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This should be on stack overflow. – Daniel A. White Aug 29 '09 at 1:26
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I upvoted the previous comment and only afterwards realised this does not belong on SO after all. The question is about downloading Eclipse for Mac, not about Cocoa/Carbon development. It could be better named though. – Jonik Aug 29 '09 at 1:55
You could always try both and see if there are any obvious differences. ...and then let the rest of us know what you find... – nilamo Aug 29 '09 at 6:13
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Cocoa supports features like spell checking and 64-bit right out of the box. Carbon is looking increasingly frowned upon by Apple. Cocoa is the way forward.

(Note that Carbon is still widely used for lower-level stuff. Many Cocoa applications dip into Carbon from time to time, and a lot of Cocoa is built on Carbon. But if you want lots of yummy UI goodness for free in each new OS, you want Cocoa.)

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If you're on an Intel Mac, download the Cocoa package. If you're on a PPC Mac, download the Carbon package.

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What reason would there be to choose the Cocoa or the Carbon kit? Both Intel and PPC have both APIs available. – Chealion Aug 29 '09 at 3:08
@Chealion: I don't have a concrete answer and all I can do is Wikipedia Cocoa and Carbon. My intuition says if you can run a Cocoa app, you'll get a performance boost and, possibly, better integration with system services (I'm thinking of AppleScript and Growl). – amoeba Aug 29 '09 at 5:33
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Better integration, yes. Performance boost, no. Your original answer looks downright wrong from where I'm standing. – Benjamin Dobson Aug 29 '09 at 6:57
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@Benjamin: You're right. I was swapping ideas around in my head and I didn't understand the distinction. It appears that the real answer to the question is that the decision is one of taste more than anything. Some people seem to dislike certain things Cocoa does, preferring Carbon's approach instead. And performance would seem lean in the opposite direction. Looks like I was partly right by dumb luck which means I was wrong. Thanks for the response which lead me to correcting that. – amoeba Aug 29 '09 at 21:13
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A basic answer would be that they use different "wrappers" around Eclipse in order to interact with the host operating system.

There is a version of SWT (the GUI toolkit used by Eclipse) that works with Carbon, and a version that works with Cocoa - so your choice isn't so much a choice of versions of Eclipse as it is a choice of which version of SWT you prefer.

The advantages of Carbon are that it's faster and more mature so technically it should be more stable. However Carbon has been more or less EOL'd with Apple's plan to not transition it to 64-bit and have developers move to use their Cocoa API instead.

The advantages of Cocoa is better integration and free extra features that are available around the operating system (eg. spell checking, various shortcuts in Open/Save dialogs), better Spaces support, etc.) Additionally you can use the 64-bit version if you'd like but it will require a 64-bit processor (which if you have an Intel Mac you're nearly guaranteed to have - only a few models shipped with 32-bit processors)

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