Maemo 5 - Linux at the core of next generation mobile OS

It's been long since I felt excited about any new mobile OS. Maemo 5 seems to be a very promising mobile OS for the next generation of mobile devices.

Multiple desktops, multitasking, Mozilla based browser, desktop widgets, cool UI, speed all seems to be best of what other OS has to offer. And guess what, it runs on Linux. The Symbian OS 9.4, Windows Mobile 6.5 or iPhone OS 3.. all seem to be moving ahead somewhat slowly. Comparing to them, Maemo 5 seems to be a leap ahead. It seems to be the next best thing after iPhone OS 1 came out thousands of years ago :).

Nokia will release N900 in a few months, the company's first phone running on Maemo 5. N900 itself has good spec with 600 MHz ARM processor, 256 MB RAM, 32 GB ROM, high-end cam, etc.

You can check more about Maemo at: http://maemo.nokia.com/ and more about N900 at http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/.

C++: Pointer to members

Pointer to member operators are not an everyday operators that we use but those can be useful if used in the correct way. Pointer to member operator ::* is used to declare a pointer that points to a member variable, pointer or function of a class. The operators .* and ->* are used to access it.

Following is an example of how we can use Pointer to member function (also called member function pointer).

  1 #include <iostream>
  2 using namespace std;
  3 
  4 class A{
  5 public:
  6       A(){
  7       }
  8       int Func(int a){
  9               return a * 2;
 10       }
 11 
 12 };
 13 
 14 int main(){
 15       int (A::*fp)(int) = &A::Func;
 16 
 17       A a;
 18       cout << (a.*fp)(10) << endl;
 19 
 20       return 0;
 21 }
 22

Following is another (almost random) example of how we can write generic classes to wrap pointer to member function to use with multiple classes.

  1 #include <iostream>
  2 using namespace std;
  3 
  4 class A{
  5 public:
  6       int Func1(int a){
  7               return a * 2;
  8       }
  9 
 10 };
 11 
 12 class B{
 13 public:
 14       int Func2(int a){
 15               return a / 2;
 16       }
 17 
 18 };
 19 
 20 template <class T>
 21 class MemFnPtr
 22 {
 23 public:
 24       MemFnPtr(int (T::*fp)(int), T &t) : m_fp(fp), m_t(t){
 25       }
 26       int Fn(int n)
 27       {
 28             return ((m_t).*(m_fp))(n);
 29       }
 30  
 31       //member vars
 32       int (T::*m_fp)(int);
 33       T &m_t;
 34 };
 35 
 36 int main(){
 37       A a_obj;
 38  
 39       MemFnPtr<A> fp_a(&A::Func1, a_obj);
 40       cout << fp_a.Fn(10) << endl;
 41 
 42       B b_obj;
 43 
 44       MemFnPtr<B> fp_b(&B::Func2, b_obj);
 45       cout << fp_b.Fn(10) << endl;
 46 
 47       return 0;
 48 }
 49 

C++ Problem: Define that macro

I'm planning to post some C++ programming problems that I come across and shall post their solutions too (I'll try to post multiple solutions). Here goes the first one:

Problem:

DO_REPORTING is MACRO which when called at the start of a function with appropriate parameter, prints the value of the parameter at the start of the function and also somehow prints the value before leaving the function. For the following code expected output would be:

Before:2
After:4
Before:4
After:2

How would you get this output without changing anything in class A and inside main function?

  1 #include <iostream>
  2 using namespace std;
  3 
  4 #define DO_REPORTING(type,variable) ;
  5 
  6 class A{
  7 protected:
  8       int val;
  9 public:
 10       A(int v){
 11             val = v;
 12       }
 13       void FuncMult(){
 14             DO_REPORTING(int, val);
 15             val *= 2;
 16       }
 17       void FuncDiv(){
 18             DO_REPORTING(int, val);
 19             val /= 2;
 20       }
 21       int GetVal(){
 22             return val;
 23       }
 24 };
 25 
 26 int main(){
 27       A a(2);
 28       a.FuncMult();
 29       a.FuncDiv();
 30       return 0;
 31 }
 32 
 33 

Solution 1:

  1 #define DO_REPORTING(type,variable) Report<type> r(val);
  2 
  3 template <class T>
  4 class Report{
  5       T &val;
  6 public:
  7       Report(T &v):val(v){
  8             cout << "Before:" << val << endl;
  9       }
 10       ~Report(){
 11             cout << "After:" << val << endl;
 12       }
 13 };
 14