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Overview In the previous two chapters, we've built a simple program, and looked at the architecture of Symbian OS. In the next chapter, we'll be taking our first look at writing GUI applications. Before we do that, it's a good idea to take a look at how Symbian OS approaches aspects of design and programming in C++. That's the purpose of this chapter. The use of C++ in Symbian OS is not exactly the same as C++ in other environments: " C++ does more than Symbian OS requires - private inheritance, for instance, and full-blown multiple inheritance. " C++ does less than Symbian OS requires - it doesn't insist on the number of bits used to represent basic types, and it doesn't know anything about DLLs. " Different C++ communities do things differently because their requirements are different. In Symbian OS, large-scale system design is combined with a focus on error handling and cleanup, and efficiency in terms of ROM and RAM budgets. The fundamental design decisions of Symbian OS were taken in 1994-1995, and its toolchain for emulator and ARM builds was essentially stable by early 1996. Since then the compilers have changed, but the coding style still bears the hallmarks of the early GCC and Microsoft Visual C++ compilers.