My boss at the Austria Press Agency wanted a software to distribute our news to Mobile Phones in 2004 or 5 or so.
So I took a deep dive into Symbian with very limited C++ understanding. It took me at least a month to figure that that C++ is not C++ at all.
In the end senior engineers, were put on it. Project went nowhere. And then came iPhone and we went down the Mobile Browser Road (years later Apps I think).
They adopted C++ very early on in the language's life. The standard at the time had not even specified how exceptions worked, so Symbian rolled their own (TRAP and User::Leave).
But then they were stuck... breaking ABI was forbidden, so more modern C++ features couldn't be used (easily).
C++ was created in 1979 - I doubt Symbian adopted it "very early".
Also, the standard doesn't specify "how exceptions work" even today, in the sense that a lot of what happens when running C++ is implementation dependent.
But I can see what you mean about sticking to pre-C++11 (maybe even pre-C++98 ?) APIs.
The first C++ standardization was C++98, released in (you guessed it) 1998. Symbian's first release, under the EPOC32 name, was in 1997, with working starting on that OS in 1994 (and the company had a prior OS, EPOC16, that was from the late 80s)
So I took a deep dive into Symbian with very limited C++ understanding. It took me at least a month to figure that that C++ is not C++ at all.
In the end senior engineers, were put on it. Project went nowhere. And then came iPhone and we went down the Mobile Browser Road (years later Apps I think).