Carbon (API)

Carbon is one of Apple Inc.'s C-based application programming interfaces (APIs) for the Macintosh operating system. Carbon provided a good degree of backward compatibility for programs that ran on the now-obsolete Mac OS 8 and 9. Developers could use the Carbon APIs to port their "classic" Mac software to the Mac OS X platform with far less effort than a port to the entirely different Cocoa system, which originated in OPENSTEP.