Porting to the Symbian Platform: Open Mobile Development in C/C++

Chapter 3. Symbian Platform Fundamentals

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows your whole leg off.

—Bjarne Stroustrup

The aim of this chapter is to introduce you to the fundamentals of Symbian C++ and to show you basic guidelines to make your existing C++ code safe on this platform. Chapter 4 describes how you can use standard C and C++ libraries on the Symbian platform, including libc, STL and the Boost libraries, and this chapter discusses native Symbian C++ idioms. The aim is to cover the fundamentals that you need to work effectively on the platform and make you familiar with the terminology used by Symbian programmers, so you can both 'talk the talk' and 'walk the walk.'

These are the parts of Symbian C++ that you can't live without, or won't want to, if you aim to write efficient and memory-safe C++ code for Symbian devices. There are entire books about Symbian C++, so this chapter is necessarily a digest of the topics essential for getting up to speed to port code to the Symbian platform. If you need or want to know more about each topic, we recommend you check out the Fundamentals of Symbian C++ wiki pages on developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php.

In the Beginning

When Symbian OS was designed in the mid-1990s, the compiler and tool chain available was not fully up to date with the evolving C++ standard. For example, exceptions were not supported initially and later, when the compiler was updated, the code generated when exception ...