Andreas Jakl's Forum Nokia Blog - Fundamental changes in native Symbian OS development

Usefulness

mopius — 2009-03-29T14:44:47Z

Yes, I also think that not too many of those new possibilities will be used in the core OS.

The question is whether Qt will be adopted by all licensees of the Symbian Foundation in the future - e.g., SonyEricsson and Samsung. If it's a Nokia-only solution or if other phones don't have all the mobile extensions, native Symbian OS C++ development might still remain the only way for some applications that want to target a broader phone manufacturer segment.

So, if developing applications using native C++ as a third party, for most situations I'd still prefer the ease of use of the new LString compared to the traditional descriptor classes - even if there's a little code overhead involved. The other changes are maybe not so fundamental for somebody who knows how to write two phase construction and how to use the cleanup stack, but could still be very helpful for newcomers.

The main question is the trade-off. Sure, if you know how, you could write perfectly efficient and error free code in native Symbian OS C++. However, I doubt that most solutions are written that way (remembering some of the source code I saw at Siemens Mobile). So: is it better to have a very efficient system and many developers not using it correctly, or a little bit overhead but less programming errors in real code? I think for third party developers who are not 100% specialized on Symbian OS, the second alternative is better.

wizard.hac — 2009-03-29T14:23:27Z

Andreas Sir, I agree with Mark - the changes wouldn't incorporate into the native OS. Even if they had many advantages (which they don't) who would change the code at so many places? Optimization is required when necessary - I don't feel it is necessary.

Qt- Well, new guys learning Qt wouldn't be wise enough to judge what to study and use- they would just learn what is in the channel and adapt.

As said- there is a lot in the pipeline.
http://hacwiz.blogspot.com/2009/03/theres-lots-more-in-pipeline-quotes.html

Indeed, who are these L-classes really for?

Sorcery-ltd — 2009-03-27T19:55:50Z

I agree completely with:
"Most probably, you'd use native Symbian OS C++ code for the more low-level and highest performance code (and do resource management manually), and prefer Qt or Widgets instead for other applications in the future."
The use of templates in the L-classes makes them generate more code than you would write doing it "the old way", so I'd assume most of the core OS development will not use them. Then, if you want to escape the complexity of Symbian C++, these classes only get you a very small part of the way there, plus they add complexity overall, since you can get rid of all the old idioms either. Qt would be a much nicer option, or why not just some standard C++ interfaced to native Symbian C++ if you're not writing a UI?

Personally I doubt this is a fundamental change in native Symbian OS development - Qt certainly is though!

Mark