Re:Symbian C++ experience (Score 1)

The console code above is not the kind of code most people will ever need to write. The Symbian framework has been designed for writing GUI apps, and not for writing console code. The only place where console code is used in a production environment is in unit test drivers. Nowhere else, not even in servers.

A Symbian exe has no environment at all when it is started, and this code is creating a tailormade environment, a cleanup stack and a console. It doesn't need to access files, so it doesn't connect to the file server, for instance.

If you want this to be a fair comparison to (for instance) Unix C++ code, you should also include _main() and __main(), and all the other startup code next to main().