Core Foundation (also called
CF) is a
C application programming interface (API) in
Mac OS X &
iOS, and is a mix of low-level routines and
wrapper functions. Apple releases most of it as an
open source project called CFLite that can be used to write cross-platform applications for Mac OS X,
Linux, and
Windows; a third-party open-source implementation called OpenCFLite also exists. Most Core Foundation routines follow a certain naming convention that deal with opaque objects, for example CFDictionaryRef for functions whose names begin with CFDictionary, and these objects are often
reference counted (manually) through
CFRetain
and
CFRelease
. Internally, Core Foundation forms the base of the types in the
Objective-C runtime as well.