Your characterization of my comment is unfair and untrue.  I didn't "cherry pick" anything; the above code is from my only significant experience with any Apple-designed API.  The grandparent comment in glowing and general terms praised Apple APIs as noticeably better than other APIs, and this ran strongly contrary to my own experience with them.  I even mentioned that this was old code, that QTKit has been released in the meantime, and that it is probably better.<p>I'm not sure why you think that old APIs designed for old architectures are obviously bad or are not relevant to the discussion.  How is C substantially different than in 1994, that newer APIs would be better?  Why do you think that architectures from 15 years ago required bad APIs?  I can think of many excellent APIs that I was using ten years ago or more.<p>Feel free to say that the new Apple APIs are much better than the old ones, but my experience says that historically Apple has had some very poor ones.