Carbon.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

skip at pobox.com writes:
 > 
 >     Rodney> I've just starting using Emacs.app for OS X....  if anyone is
 >     Rodney> interested, it can be found at http://emacs-app.sourceforge.net/
 > 
 > Yikes!  How many different Mac OS X ports of various flavors of Emacs are
 > available?  It seems there are two Carbon-based ports based on the guy
 > (what's his name? Choi?) who has disappeared (one GNU Emacs, one XEmacs).

Choi is still there, producing occasional improvements to his XEmacs
port.  He's a very odd bird, and like Dan Bernstein, insists on
licensing his code in an idiosyncratic and inconvenient way.  Unlike
Bernstein, he hasn't a clue about what he is doing, which creates
legal and ethical uncertainty about adopting and distributing his
code.

 > There is Aquamacs.  There's Emacs.app.  Am I missing anything?  Why the
 > explosion in Mac ports?

There are two very different philosophies at work, for one thing.
Aquamacs, in particular, is aiming at an Aqua-conforming editor with
the power of Emacs.  The Emacs developers, on the other hand, want
Emacs to run natively on the Mac.  I expect Aquamacs to be a fairly
permanent fork.

The Carbon-based ports are very much in line with the "native on Mac"
philosophy.  The Cocoa-based ports are necessarily Aqua-conforming,
that's what Cocoa is for.  I found the Cocoa-based ports to be
occasionally annoying because of that (don't recall offhand what it
was).