[Development] Deprecation of qMalloc/qFree/qRealloc

[Robin Burchell]

hi Andreas,

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 4:21 PM, Andreas Holzammer
<andreas.holzammer at kdab.com> wrote:
> Many of them have trouble with memory allocation, if you have one point where you can
> change the allocation it is easy to bypass these problems.

Though, as you noted, you don't actually have one place to do this.
You never have. There's parts of Qt that don't use malloc(), and the
entire of things like v8 and other stuff in src/3rdparty/ doesn't (and
won't ever) either.

Also note that, as I said, you can still swap out malloc for something
else with platform-specific methods like LD_PRELOAD. Or if you're
willing to patch Qt (and src/3rdparty/) to do this, then you can just
as easily patch Qt to use your own allocation path. It's pretty much
just a matter of search and replace (and verify the results).

> This is just my point of view in this. But keep in mind that the Qt
> embedded market is growing and that stuff like this is needed there.

I know this well (and even sympathise with it a bit), but personally,
I'd rather see those platforms improve a bit more than make everyone
else suffer a penalty by default. It may not be a huge penalty, but
why do it when we can avoid it? Qt 5 is a good time to do this, as
it's still quite a bit off actually being used in products, and if
anyone is in a position to help set requirements for the future, Qt 5
certainly is.

Thanks for the feedback,

Robin