At the official opening event of its Beijing office, Symbian Ltd today announced the introduction of POSIX libraries on Symbian OS, which will significantly reduce the effort required to migrate existing desktop and server components, and mobile applications from other platforms, onto Symbian OS. The move will help broaden and deepen application development for Symbian OS and help improve developer productivity.
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. This has been achieved by supplying a new framework of POSIX C APIs for use by both C and C++ programmers. The new APIs are packaged into industry standard libraries – libc, libm, libpthread and libdl – and are tightly integrated with Symbian OS to optimise performance and memory usage. In addition, an updated tool chain will further reduce migration effort.
A beta version of P.I.P.S. will be available for Symbian OS v9.1 and above as a downloadable .SIS file from the Symbian Developer Network by the end of Q1 2007.