This is the public Open Source distribution of Apple, Inc.'s CoreFoundation framework, sometimes known as "CF-lite" because it does not contain every facility available from the CoreFoundation framework in Mac OS X. This distribution is refered to as Open CF-lite to distinguish it from the official Apple release, and to reflect the Open Source nature of this project.

This CoreFoundation corresponds to the Mac OS X 10.5.6 version of CF (CF-476.17)

This distribution differs from the official Apple, Inc. release in that it is known to build and run on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It would probably be trivial to port to most other POSIX-based environments (volunteers welcome!)

The goal of this port is to provide a feature-compatible, cross platform version of the official CoreFoundation framework. In general, we do not propose extending functionality beyond the official Apple release so that this project can serve as a drop-in replacement.

To repeat Apple's statement:

--- What Apple is NOT interested in, with CF-lite:

• Everybody's little convenience methods. Just because "everybody has to write their own", it does not follow immediately that it is a good idea to add it to the system libraries. It is not a goal of CF to be a "Swiss Army Knife"; that just increases the size of the binaries, and the documentation and maintenance burden. Functions to reverse a string or merge two arrays by taking alternate elements from the two arrays are not compelling.

The current release is known to work on Windows at a sufficient level to run the WebKit infrastructure.

Support is available from the discussion groups at http://opencflite.sf.net.

Enjoy!

Brent Fulgham [email protected] Grant Erickson [email protected]