Developer Documentation
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Carbon Developer Documentation > Core Foundation


Core Foundation is a library of low-level services which help you to build cross-platform, easily localized applications. Core Foundation provides abstractions for common data types, facilitates internationalization with Unicode string storage, and offers a suite of utilities such as plug-in support, XML property lists, URL resource access, and preferences. Core Foundation is included as part of CarbonLib on Mac OS 8 and 9. For Mac OS X, Core Foundation will be included as an independent framework.


Base Services
Base Services provides the base types and polymorphic functions which are used throughout the Core Foundation API.
Bundle Services
Bundle Services provides an elegant means of organizing and locating many types of application resources including images, sounds, localized strings, and executable code.
 
Collection Services
Collection Services provides high-level abstractions of common data structures including arrays, sets, dictionaries, and trees.
 

Overview
Summarizes the benefits of Core Foundation and explains some of the key concepts, such as opaque types, reference counting, and memory management.

 
Plug In Services
Core Foundation Plug-in Services uses the basic code-loading facility of Core Foundation Bundle Services to provide a standard plug-in architecture for Carbon applications.

Property List Services
Property List Services provides a means to organize data into a form that is meaningfully structured, transportable, storable, and accessible, but still as efficient as possible. The property list API allows you to convert hierarchically structured combinations of basic data types to and from standard XML.

String Services
String Services provides a full suite of fast and efficient string manipulation and conversion functionality. String Services offers seamless Unicode support and thus greatly simplifies internationalization. String Services also facilitates the sharing of string data between Carbon and Cocoa applications.

Utility Services
This document describes the various APIs that make up Utility Services and explains how each is used in conjunction with other Core Foundation Services.