Essential Idioms

This section describes some of the distinctive programming idioms and conventions for the Symbian platform.

Additional useful information, in particular the Symbian platform's own internal coding standards, can be found at Coding Standards Quick Start .

• Naming Conventions
  
• Layout Conventions
  
• Class types
  
• C++ and Machine Architecture
  The C++ language, following its foundation in C, is close to the machine architecture. This allows applications to be implemented efficiently, but, especially for developers new to the language, presents some issues of which you need to be aware. This topic reviews the basic language features from this perspective, and discusses how the resulting issues are handled.
• Object Orientation Basics
  
• Object Lifetimes and Cleanup
  
• Multiple Inheritance and Interfaces
  
• Descriptors
  
• Thin Templates
  
• Code Efficiency
  
• Defensive Programming
  
• Static Data
  
• Frameworks, Libraries and DLLs
  
• UIDs
  
• Application Start-Up Time Optimization
  It is important that phone users do not have to wait long for applications to start. This document summarizes the techniques for optimizing application start-up time.
• Exporting and Importing Classes
  
• Symbian Platform Fundamentals Example Code
  This code demonstrates the fundamental Symbian platform classes and shows basic techniques that can be employed in developing Symbian platform applications.