I recently recieved a Mac, complete with OS X. I was curious about programming on it. From all the reading I've done on it it seems the two C API sets are Carbon and Cocoa.

Cocoa uses something called Objective-C, which is Apple's enhanced C language, not sure why they didn't use C++ since its already pretty popular and includes the object oriented stuff that was included in Objective-C. There may be more there, I'm not keen on learning another language (particularly a proprietary one) for a platform I'm not sure if I'm going to keep using.

Carbon is a straight C API. However, it appears that its an intermediary API for those converting from the old Mac OS API's. Which kinda sounds like Apple will keep it around until everyone is up to date then drop support, thats just speculation by me though and I've been labeled cynical before.

So whats the deal? Anyone know if OS X has a C or C++ API that is guarenteed to be supported in the forseeable future?