Symbian programming platform was a nightmare: C++ with no exceptions, no STL and no RAII. You couldn't use any normal C++ programming idioms, you had to use Symbian-specific memory management primitives. A quote from TheRegister article:
> "Symbian is the only platform that has to spend one day teaching people how to use strings before they can code in it. The approved method is that you create an HBufC (a Heap allocated, BUFfer that is Constant), then Call Des() on it (which returns a TPtr - a pointer to a writable descriptor),"
