“As some of you may know (and most of you probably don’t), Apple
is currently developing MacOS X, a replacement to MacOS based on
top of Mach3 and BSD but with the traditional Macintosh look and
feel. In order to allow developers to quickly port their existing
MacOS-based applications to MacOS X, Apple has created a
portability layer named Carbon. Carbon takes the nearly 9000 MacOS
APIs, trims the dead weight, adds some new stuff, and offers the
remaining 6000 APIs for use on top of MacOS X. All developers need
to do is tweak their existing MacOS code to fit the new Carbon API
and their apps will run in a separate process, taking full
advantage of MacOS X’s memory protection and pre-emptiveness.”
“Around May, 1999 (Mozilla milestone 5, or M5) we made those
modifcations to Mozilla and created a single binary that ran on
both MacOS 8.5 and MacOS X. The resulting app, code named Fizzilla,
made its public debut onstage at the MacOS X Session at Apple’s
WWDC ’99. People liked it.”
“In the time between May and December, 1999, Apple did a
significant amount of profiling work on MacOS X using Fizzilla as a
test application. Their findings set us in a new direction which we
believe will yield the best possible solution for many of the
problems which have traditonally plagued our MacOS
products.”