Cocoa® Programming

Related Core Foundation

With the release of Mac OS X, Apple has extended and documented much of the low-level code used to implement the Foundation framework. The code is included in a standard C library that Apple calls Core Foundation. The Core Foundation library consists of a set of procedural APIs and data structures that can be used from Cocoa or Carbon applications. In some cases, Foundation framework classes are internally implemented using Core Foundation functions. In other cases, there is effectively no difference between Core Foundation data structures and corresponding Foundation framework objects. Such objects are said to be “toll free bridged,” meaning that Core Foundation just provides a procedural API for accessing objects.