Symbian has just released P.I.P.S in Beijing, China. P.I.P.S. stands for “P.I.P.S. Is POSIX on Symbian OS”. It is a recursive acronym. It reminds me to GNU, which is a recursive acronym for “GNU is Not UNIX”.
P.I.P.S. - PIPS Is POSIX on Symbian - will enable C programmers to more easily migrate existing middleware and applications, either commercial or open source, to Symbian OS by providing standard POSIX C APIs on Symbian OS.
For me, this is very good news. It proves that Symbian is listening to developers’ feedback. As you may know that many developers have been saying that Symbian OS has “uncommon” programming paradigms, such as active object, leave/trap mechanism, etc.
Bringing POSIX to Symbian OS is a big step to attract more third-party developers to develop applications for this platform. Furthermore, it would reduce the cost of porting code from other platforms to Symbian OS. With so many cool open source projects out there, the sky is the limit.
What is actually POSIX? According to Wikipedia:
POSIX or “Portable Operating System Interface for uniX” is the collective name of a family of related standards specified by the IEEE to define the application programming interface (API) for software compatible with variants of the Unix operating system.
POSIX basically contains APIs that are compatible across many operating systems. One example of the APIs, which is also part of P.I.P.S, is Standard C Library. Another example, which is part of POSIX.1c, is thread libraries, such as thread creation, scheduling and synchronization. If you are interested to read more about POSIX including the list of header files, you can visit Open Group’s Single UNIX Specification.
There is not so much information from Symbian’s press release about P.I.P.S. implementation, such as how many POSIX functions that have been implemented on P.I.P.S. We have to wait until the end of Q1 2007 to download the first beta version of P.I.P.S.
So, what’s coming to Symbian OS after POSIX? C++’s STL (Standard Template Library)?
