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Symbian Source Code

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Re: Symbian Source Code

#151

Post by commandar »

dietrichepp wrote: post #140
lproven wrote: post #38

It is odd to see people talking about how Symbian was so early on, in the smartphone era. It's considerably more mature than that. :-) (For the avoidance of doubt: this is a good thing .) Symbian was a rebrand of the Psion 5 and 5MX OS, which was called EPOC32. It also ran on some other hardware, including the Ericsson MC218, Oregon Scientific Osaris, and Geofox One. The first EPOC32 device was the Psion 5 in 1997: h…

Worth mentioning the N-Gage, which got a Wordle port recently, powered by SDL2: https://hackaday.com/2022/04/08/wordle-comes-to-the-nokia-n-... I remember the N-Gage being lambasted when it came out, but recently I realized that those same people also lambasted the iPod, and maybe I can't trust those people's judgment about tech. You know, the Slashdot crowd. Maybe it was a good system that was just poorly positioned…

>and the more recent comments I've heard about it are along the lines of "underrated system that was ahead of its time".

It always had a following, but the thing flopping wasn't because of the Slashdot crowd, it's because it just wasn't very good out of the gate.

The N-Gage has an awful form factor that made it suck both as a gaming device and as a phone. Game cartridges were hidden behind the battery, button placement was awkward, and sidetalking became an early internet meme for very good reason.

Nokia fixed a lot of the problems with a second generation release, but at that point the brand was largely poisoned.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#152

Post by ma5ter »

miohtama wrote: post #115
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was so common to have malware and viruses on nokia phones I never experienced that and don’t know anyone who did. Was it really a thing?

I don’t think this is true. I worked extensively in the mobile industry back in the day and all Nokia apps had more painful signing process than iOS apps have today.

No, It's true, most my fiends who used to install pirated application (.sis file) from internet got affected by these viruses and at that time most popular antivirus companies (McAfee, Kaspersky, f-secure) had Symbian versions of their antivirus programs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabir_(computer_worm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commwarrior

Re: Symbian Source Code

#153

Post by distances »

ma5ter wrote: post #152
miohtama wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think this is true. I worked extensively in the mobile industry back in the day and all Nokia apps had more painful signing process than iOS apps have today.

No, It's true, most my fiends who used to install pirated application (.sis file) from internet got affected by these viruses and at that time most popular antivirus companies (McAfee, Kaspersky, f-secure) had Symbian versions of their antivirus programs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabir_(computer_worm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commwarrior

I'm not sure what you expect here. Is it the manufacturer's fault if you sideload virus infested applications?

Re: Symbian Source Code

#154

Post by danmur »

lproven wrote: post #38

It is odd to see people talking about how Symbian was so early on, in the smartphone era. It's considerably more mature than that. :-) (For the avoidance of doubt: this is a good thing .) Symbian was a rebrand of the Psion 5 and 5MX OS, which was called EPOC32. It also ran on some other hardware, including the Ericsson MC218, Oregon Scientific Osaris, and Geofox One. The first EPOC32 device was the Psion 5 in 1997: h…

My MC218 still works, pretty crazy. I had the IR modem for it too but lost it somewhere.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#155

Post by cycomanic »

Moto7451 wrote: post #130
cycomanic wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm remembering wrong but didn't the iPhone not have multitasking for apps for a long time as well. I recall that essentially the OS did something like a snapshot of every app when one switched.

The iPhone always had multitasking. What it didn’t allow was background processing. When selected again, your app would be suspended and allowed to run again or be launched fresh based on memory pressure.

As someone else said Symbian also was capable of multitasking, it was the frameworks that did not allow is. Can someone explain the practical difference for someone programming an app between the iphone and symbian limitations?

Re: Symbian Source Code

#157

Post by zelos »

teknolog wrote: post #110
OnlyMortal wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn’t Symbian Ed up using a version of CodeWarrior? Unfortunately, a Windows version of memory serves.

They did for a long time, but they eventually switched to an Eclipse based system. I believe there was a Nokia team in Dallas that built that.

That was Carbide IIRC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbide.c%2B%2B

You could always tell who was using it in the office because their laptop fans would be at full blast.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#159

Post by KolenCh »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #141
liuliu wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Binary dump / prewarmed up Python interpreter would be amazing even today. Could enable a lot use cases with Python.

youtube-dl/yt-dlp (Python) is a full second slower than youtubedr (Go) or youtube.com (JS) to download YouTube videos, and I think a lot of that is due to interpreter warmup (though I don't know exactly why). Sadly mpv only supports youtube-dl/yt-dlp for watching videos, and youtubedr doesn't have the vast plugin ecosystem of yt-dlp for non-YouTube websites.

The above mentioned Python’s import delay. This is a notorious behavior in high performance situation (including your cli startup time example). Essentially the import process is IO intensive. This comes up in massive parallel applications as at launch each process is importing the same stuffs. It is briefly mentioned for example in https://docs.nersc.gov/development/languages/python/

If you really care about the startup time, you could pre-compile it. Nuitka and Cython could do this with different limitations.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#160

Post by rospaya »

lproven wrote: post #101
markb139 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first Symbian based Nokia device was the 9210. I helped integrate the fax functionality - was amazing to see the first faxes sent and received :)

Fair enough! I defer to your superior wisdom. So, four years earlier, not five. :-) I have seen comments from people who worked at Accenture in the last days of Symbian, about the difficulty of putting together the build system today. Apparently bits need a specific MS C++ compiler that only runs on WinXP. I think it would be wonderful to see this resurrected and ported to the RasPi or something. Symbian was capable…

> One of the things that crippled Symbian in the market was the range of UIs, all incompatible

I disagree. All of them were used on different devices, with S60 being the most popular and used on most phones, just regular market differentiation.

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