Several people have privately expressed concern that the native-mode
Visual 5 implementation on the Mac is based on Carbon rather than Cocoa.
We developers are concerned, too. The problem is that Apple has begun
the process of dropping support for Carbon, a decision that has caused a
lot of anguish among many developers.
Unfortunately, it seems to be extremely difficult (impossible?) to base
Visual on Cocoa, for highly technical reasons having to do with who is
the primary thread. Some months ago I posted a question about this to
the cocoa-dev mailing list. The first response flamed at me for being an
idiot for wanting to continue to use Carbon. The second response said
roughly, "No, the poor guy has a serious problem. Years ago we faced a
similar, daunting problem trying to get Java working in the Mac
environment."
At the moment we seem to have no option for responding to the strong
need for a native-mode Mac version but to base it on Carbon. Maybe
someone deeply knowledgeable in the Mac will step forward eventually
with a Cocoa solution, which would be great.
There is a somewhat related problem with Visual 5 on the Mac in that it
is no longer possible to call Tcl functions, even in the Carbon environment.
Bruce Sherwood
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