STDLIB Console and I/O operations

Console versus terminals

The STDLIB console (encapsulated by class CTtyDesc , defined in fdesc.h ) is a client of the CConsoleBase class implemented by econs.dll . It provides very simple text input and output with no support for embedded control sequences. When STDLIB receives a character from the console it prints it out to the same console, providing a "local echo" facility to make simple command-line interfaces possible.

STDLIB does not provide any sort of terminal driver or line-discipline. In particular there is no support for local processing of backspace, nor any line buffering. Neither does it provide termio or termcap facilities. The Symbian platform is a graphics-based system and it is recommended that C code be ported into a Symbian program which uses a graphical user interface.

Asynchronous I/O vs blocking I/O

All STDLIB I/O operations are blocking; that is they will suspend the calling thread indefinitely until the I/O completes. Hence, in general, STDLIB I/O must not be used in a Symbian platform active object because it will cause the entire active scheduler to block. A possible way to avoid this problem might be to use fcntl() for individual file descriptors, but STDLIB does not currently implement this function.

Asynchronous I/O can be achieved using a set of C++ functions provided by STDLIB which implement a per-file-descriptor equivalent of the POSIX select() function. These functions provide a form of the ioctl() function which takes a TRequestStatus& as a parameter, together with functions for completing the ioctl() operation once the status has been signaled or canceling the pending ioctl . This scheme can be used within an active object to wait for a socket to become ready for reading or writing, so that the subsequent i/o does not block the whole active scheduler. See estlib.h for the interface to these functions. For more information on active objects and active scheduler, see active objects .

NOTE : There are no such blocking problems with I/O to local files, which is essentially a synchronous operation.

See also

Active Objects