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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Symbian was the last weird built-from-scratch OS that shipped a massive amount of units (over 100M in 2010).

In its last years it got a POSIX compatibility layer. Before that it was hard to even use C strings — which I presume was considered a feature by the Symbian API designers, but unfortunately they made their design choices in the mid-1990s using a subset of C++ that didn’t age well at all.

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I think QNX still ships in large quantities, just not on devices consumers see as "computers". It has a POSIX layer though.

FWIW Nintendo's Horizon OS is also built from scratch (and isn't Unix at all), and has also shipped on a massive amount of units (over 110M as of 2022).

(and it happens to have a libcurl port)

Fair point, but it's not an open platform, so not a lot of developers will encounter it. Symbian was open in the same sense as Windows or macOS.

But the point is that crazy thing was not what the developer said was the hardest to deal with. Doesn't matter much that it's closed or not many developers see it, he does.

I mean by your qualifications, Linux in the form of Android "was the last weird built from scratch OS that shipped a massive amount of units".

Also it is not true. A sibling comment mentions Nintendo Switch OS.

Linux is both older than Symbian and wasn't designed from scratch since it's derived from Unix. So I guess it's a philosophical question whether Android is Linux or something new.

Linux is just a kernel, and only a Unix-like kernel at that. It is not an operating system. You're probably thinking of the GNU/Linux operating system, but then GNU is a recursive acronym for GNU's Not Unix. Android forgoes the GNU part, but maintains the Linux part (albeit with some patches).

Yeah, that's the point. Symbian was built from scratch for mobile devices, kernel and everything on top. Anything Linux-based isn't.

While both written from scratch at some point in history, the trouble is that Linux is the newer one. Symbian is rebranded EPOC, which is older than Linux.

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