Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Symbian and Open-C: A porting we shall go

Yay, I now have libsigc++, libferrisloki, libferrisstreams and stldb4 compiling and all but the last one actually useful on an Nokia E61. It makes a huge difference to the whole coding for embedded knowing that you have decent std iostreams and intrusive reference counted objects.

The stldb4 is a pain in though as it crashes in the test client. Its just so much fun that the remote debug stuff is work thousands of Euros, making on device testing just so easy for folks who dont have suitcases of cash laying around.

Looks like ye olde cout << "...1" << endl; on device debugging until I manage to move something like Enamel out of libferris onto the s60. Perhaps a port of syslog to symbian would help, atleast I'd be able to get network streamed log events.

Very few changes actually were required in libferrisstreams. Unfortunately the madvise() call was one of them. This gets used in ferrisstreams for memory mapped IO to tell the kernel of sequential IO access with MADV_SEQUENTIAL. This is probably more relevant to desktop and server machines than embedded anyway, seek times being so different between a flash disk and regular HDD.

All I need to do now is actually iron out why Berkeley db-4.x on symbian is deciding to do funny things for me and I'll have quite a nice little start making a nicer coding environment for s60.

Shame I'm too late for the little Open-C port a posix contest that was floating around.

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