Update on STLport for Symbian OS

This is an update for those of you who are following the development of STLport for Symbian OS in this blog. As I announced in my previous post the library is almost complete, but I've found that I/O through fstream is pretty unstable, especially in the emulator. After fixing a small bug in STLport I got the stdio-based implementation of fstream work, although with poor performance, on my N80 phone and on a few other devices through Remote Device Access. However, performance on the emulator is so horrible that I couldn't make fstream unit tests complete in a reasonable amount of time. Also, the emulator occasionally crashes or terminates the application with a panic when certain combinations of read/write operations are done.

I think the I/O routines in OpenC are quite buggy (as seems to be the family of printf functions, see here) because even simple code can occasionally fail or even crash. In particular, I'm observing a behavior similar to that described in this post at Forum Nokia, but it's not easily reproducible as it doesn't happen always (and not always under the same conditions).
As a result of two days wasted trying to make buggy things work, I've decided to try a better way: provide a custom implementation of fstream based on native Symbian OS calls rather than on OpenC calls. This shouldn't be too hard, but if I see that it's going to take too long then I'll just keep things as they are and I'll defer the fix until the next release.

Current status of unit tests is pretty encouraging though: only 3 tests out of 385 are still failing! I'm confident that I'll be able to make a release before next week.