Core Foundation

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Core Foundation
Developer(s)Apple Inc.
Repositorygithub.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation
Written inSwift, Objective-C, C
Operating system
TypeSystem library
LicenseAPSL 2.0
Websitedeveloper.apple.com

Core Foundation (also called CF) is a

Carbon API.[1]

The most prevalent use of Core Foundation is for passing its own primitive types for data, including raw

interprocess communication through CFMachPort and CFNotificationCenter, and a basic graphical user interface
message dialog through CFUserNotification.

Other parts of the API include utility routines and wrappers around existing APIs for ease of use. Utility routines perform such actions as

I/O through CFReadStream, CFWriteStream, and CFURL and endianness
translation (Byte Order Utilities). Some examples of wrapper routines include those for Core Foundation's wrapper routines for Unix sockets, the CFSocket API.

Some types in Core Foundation are "toll-free bridged", or interchangeable with a simple cast, with those of their Foundation Kit counterparts. For example, one could create a CFDictionaryRef Core Foundation type, and then later simply use a standard C cast to convert it to its Objective-C counterpart, NSDictionary *, and then use the desired Objective-C methods on that object as one normally would.

Core Foundation has a plug-in model (CFPlugin) that is based on the Microsoft Component Object Model.[2]

Open source availability

Apple used to release most of CF as an open-source project called CFLite that can be used to write cross-platform applications for macOS, Linux, and Windows.[3]

A third-party open-source implementation called OpenCFLite extends the Apple CFLite for building on 32-bit Windows and Linux environments. It is maintained by one of the WebKit developers, but was stalled by 2015.[4] The karaoke platform KJams maintains a fork since 2017. This version, by its programmer David M. Cotter, supports 64-bit systems and has a CFNetwork implementation with LibreSSL-based TLS.[5] A fork of OpenCFLite was created by Grant Erickson (an original collaborator with Brent Fulgham on the SourceForge version) in 2021[6] with a companion port of the CFHost portion of CFNetwork, as OpenCFNetwork.[7]

The Swift Corelib Foundation, a fallback version of the

Apache License 2.0.[8]

GNUstep includes a version of the Core Foundation called "libs-corebase".[9]

See also

References

  1. ^ ridiculous_fish (2006). "Bridge".
  2. ^ "Plug-ins and Microsoft's COM". Mac Developer Library. Apple Inc. Archived from the original on September 1, 2014. Retrieved March 25, 2015.
  3. ^ "Source Browser".
  4. ^ OpenCFLite project on SourceForge.
  5. ^ "CFLite". KJams. Retrieved February 19, 2020.
  6. ^ "OpenCFLite project on GitHub". Retrieved November 30, 2021.
  7. ^ "OpenCFNetwork project on GitHub". Retrieved November 30, 2021.
  8. ^ "swift-corelibs-foundation". GitHub. October 14, 2021.
  9. ^ "gnustep/libs-corebase: The GNUstep CoreBase Library is a library of general-purpose, non-graphical C objects". GitHub. GNUstep. November 19, 2019.

External links