[Development] RFC: Proposal for a semi-radical change in Qt APIs taking strings

[Thiago Macieira]

On Tuesday 20 October 2015 09:44:23 Marc Mutz wrote:
> So if deep copies loose their ineffciency myth, what reason remains to not
> use  QSV in all functions taking QString?

Complicating the API.

You cannot possibly prove that doing something O(n) is as efficient as doing 
something O(1), therefore there's no way that deep copies would be a myth.

COW may have comparable performance to deep copies if you consider the whole 
picture and code written properly. Our code was written for COW, so I doubt 
that you would get the same performance by suddenly making deep copies.

To summarise:

1) I'm ok with adding QStringView
2) I'm ok with using QStringView in applications, no restraints
3) I'm ok with exploring the use in API, in parameters
4) I'm ok with exploring it in return values, in very limited conditions that 
are being studied very well, ahead of time

Exploring does not mean you can go and start adding overloads everywhere.
-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center