[Development] RFD: plugins vs QStringLiterals

[Thiago Macieira]

On Thursday 05 November 2015 21:06:20 Marc Mutz wrote:
> On Thursday 05 November 2015 17:44:33 Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > Proposal: force QStringLiteral uses to always address a heap-allocated
> > QString, instead of pointing to the static data. Possibly, this should be
> > an  interned atom/quark à la GQuark, so two passes on the same
> > QStringLiteral would result in the same heap pointers.
> 
> TL;DR: what's atom/quark in this context?

The documentation for XAtom and GQuark probably explains more. Basically it's 
a string that becomes managed by the library and for which a pointer 
comparison guarantees string comparison.

	str1 == str2 ←→ &str1 == &str2

Obviously this is more useful for when you have pointers (GQuark) or you have 
some other form of identifier (XAtom).

The benefit for us is that it would allocate memory only on the first use. 
After that, it always returns the same pre-allocated string data.

We'd implement it using a QSet.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center