Architectural Limitations of Symbian OS

Architectural Limitations of Symbian OS

One of the main obstacles to porting STK to Symbian OS was the lack of global static memory. This means that applications are barred from sharing information through the mechanism of global static variables in C++ (Stichbury 2004). In STK global variables are used in a few contexts:

1] 

The first one is to store the currently active sampling rate, which is then accessed through Stk::sampleRate(). Making this information local would have meant adding substantial amount of argument passing to most STK classes. Hence we opted to solve this problem by making the sampling rate a global compiletime defined constant again, called SRATE. This mechanism used to be in place in earlier versions of STK.

2]

 The second instance is error message support. The mechanisms to give debug messages are rather limited

and different from desktop devices. Hence we have decided to disable this class altogether. 

3]

 Shaker index number was stored in a local static variable. It was made a member variable of tt Shakers serving the same purpose.3 Audio Support of Symbian OS Symbian OS offers various ways to play audio data (Nokia 2005b; Nokia 2005a). For the purpose of porting STK, the streaming of data buffers is needed. Symbian OS provides such streaming capability, which in its interface architecture closely mimicks the interface of RTAudio (Scavone and Cook 2005).