@Jeff Johnson: The real Core Foundation, which does back Cocoa's Foundation, is closed source. There are known differences between CFLite and CoreFoundation.
You didn't mention specifics, so I'm not sure if we disagree. Clearly the "lite" version is different by definition for the reasons you cite, but I don't know if that really prevents it from being useful in the way you suggest. I do see how the wording made it sound like Foundation was backed by CFLite instead of CF, so I changed that bit above.
That said, I don't think reading CFString.c and drawing conclusions from that is going to send you down the wrong path. It wouldn't be in anyone's interest to maintain two radically different versions of the same Foundation-level class. In fact, ridiculous_fish has referred to CFLite sources a number of times to describe how Foundation works.
If you think I've misunderstood your point or I'm missing a critical piece of information, let me know. Admittedly, I haven't gone line-by-line through the CFLite sources.
@Elliott Hughes: If you're only trying to tell Apple developers that they can see their kernel source too
That was part of it, but the other reason was to address the idea that some new Mac users have (often coming from Windows) that you can't get "under the hood" of Mac OS X. I don't think this is true in even the general sense, but certainly you can't get much more under the hood than kernel source.
by Scott Stevenson — Sep 27
You didn't mention specifics, so I'm not sure if we disagree. Clearly the "lite" version is different by definition for the reasons you cite, but I don't know if that really prevents it from being useful in the way you suggest. I do see how the wording made it sound like Foundation was backed by CFLite instead of CF, so I changed that bit above.
That said, I don't think reading CFString.c and drawing conclusions from that is going to send you down the wrong path. It wouldn't be in anyone's interest to maintain two radically different versions of the same Foundation-level class. In fact, ridiculous_fish has referred to CFLite sources a number of times to describe how Foundation works.
If you think I've misunderstood your point or I'm missing a critical piece of information, let me know. Admittedly, I haven't gone line-by-line through the CFLite sources.
@Elliott Hughes: If you're only trying to tell Apple developers that they can see their kernel source too
That was part of it, but the other reason was to address the idea that some new Mac users have (often coming from Windows) that you can't get "under the hood" of Mac OS X. I don't think this is true in even the general sense, but certainly you can't get much more under the hood than kernel source.