[Development] QtCore missing check for memory allocation

[Robin Burchell]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 10:17 PM, Konstantin Ritt <ritt.ks at gmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe a bit off-topic: can we introduce our own (probably customizable)
> memory allocation API, something like Apple's CFAllocator [1], and move Qt
> internals to use it instead of malloc/realloc/free (and maybe instead of
> some new/delete-s, based on some policies)?

Before you go all-out on something like that, please make sure you
benchmark and consider the cost. Memory allocation is already
something that is quite slow, and yet, done a lot - all over the place
(too much, even, but that's a rant for another day).

IIRC when I pushed for deprecating qMalloc/qFree in the past, I
measured (on Linux) a ~10% time penalty for small allocations,
lowering to 0-5% as allocation size increased. That's a way too hefty
penalty to ask people to pay on something so universal - and that was
literally just a function wrapping malloc, no "debugging or
monitoring".

Furthermore, aside from performance, I don't think that reintroducing
a wrapper is a smart way to do it for much the same reason why I
wanted to get rid of them in the first place: they weren't universally
used, leading some people to get the false impression that
intercepting qMalloc would give them the kind of diagnostic
information you're talking about.

If you want to debug or monitor, then I'd suggest doing it a lot more
centrally with something dedicated to that task, see e.g. heaptrack
(http://milianw.de/tag/heaptrack).