

Nokia to Acquire and Open Source Symbian - st3fan
http://mobile.slashdot.org/mobile/08/06/24/1224209.shtml

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st3fan
Even if Symbian went open source, it would still suck. Their API is just so
terrible.

~~~
ajross
And it goes much deeper than just the API. The whole architecture is a
shambles. Some of this may have been fixed in the four happy years since I
touched the platform, but some of the highlights I can remember:

\+ No static data. The linker pukes if you have a global variable somewhere.
If it's not on the stack or heap, the OS can't handle it. This, of course,
means that basically all useful C code from other platforms will fail to build
by design on Symbian.

\+ Their "linker" was this awful two-stage thing that used a custom ARM gcc
build to generate a windows-style PE-COFF DLL (?), which then got munged by
_another_ gadget into their actual native format. Yes, it seems they literally
could not figure out how to write a GNU ld linker script...

\+ No blocking I/O calls at all, again insuring that otherwise common idioms
(like, say, reading a file) require elaborate contortions using their "Active
Object" abstraction, which is a clumsy event handler with a ton of scaffolding
around it.

\+ No notion of users, or file permissions, or anything that might be
interpreted as a security model.

I could go on, but this is the stuff I can pull off the top of my head.
Really, this platform is a disaster. Just let it die.

~~~
mpfefferle
FWIW Symbian 9 allows static data in UI processes, uses a standard ARM ABI,
and has a homebrew non-unixy security model called "Platform Security". I'm
not saying it's a great platform, but they were starting to make progress
before I abandoned them a year ago.

