Nokia to Acquire and Open Source Symbian | Hacker News Reader

Nokia to Acquire and Open Source Symbian

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2 pointsst3fan5 comments

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

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.

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.

What I really don't like is their terrible C++ style. Working with Objective-C on the iPhone or Java on Android is just so much more developer friendly.

Despite their current market share, it is a desperation move. Why else would a market leader open their product? They are trying to stay relevant because they know iPhone and Android are going to steal a lot of the growth in the industry from them.

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