[Development] Why does QFactoryLoader and QLibrary cache information in QSettings?

[Chris Meyer]

Why does QFactoryLoader and QLibrary cache information in QSettings?

Does this cache information need to be available between application launches?

Is there a performance reason?

Are the reasons different from platform to platform?

Could the use of QSettings be replaced with a local QMap object?

corelib/plugin/qfactoryloader.cpp
corelib/plugin/qlibrary.cpp

We're trying to minimize (actually: eliminate) usage of QSettings so
that helper apps embedded in our Mac OS app store application don't
write to disk.