[Development] QList

Marc Mutz marc.mutz at kdab.com
Mon Mar 20 14:13:30 CET 2017


On Monday 20 March 2017 13:42:09 Martin Smith wrote:
> >Qt must have acceptable performance for end user applications to be able
> >to have acceptable performance at all - whether or not it is a priority
> >to those developers.
> 
> I write an application that has two performance requirements:
> 
> 1. It must complete execution in 1 minute.
> 
> 2. It must not run out of memory.

Sorry for highjacking your mail, I know this is hardly related, but seeing 
"application" here, I need to repeat the following:

We're talking about Qt here. Qt is not an application. Qt is a library. 
Different users use it differently. You cannot predict what will be the 
bottleneck for any given user, thus you have to optimise everything. We don't 
have the man-power to optimise everything, so we must settle for _not 
pessimising_ anything. But Qt in the past has pessimised way too much, be it 
Q_FOREACH, QList<QVariant>, CoW, ... We need to stop pessimising the common 
tasks to optimize uncommon ones.

If someone copies a std::vector with a million elements by value in a tight 
loop, any profiler in the world will be able to pinpoint that hotspot, and the 
developer is happy, because the fix is easy.

OTOH, no profiler in the world will ever pinpoint to the developer the 
slowdown caused by using QVector or QList in normal usage patterns. As a 
result of Qt's sloppiness, your application is 2x slower than it could be, 
with no indication as to why. You need to have good luck and a very powerful 
(and expensive) profiler to have a chance to find that QVector performs worse 
than std::vector in general. Worse, you can't do anything about it, because 
replacing one QVector with std::vector has neglible effect. With luck, if you 
replaced all you'd get a 20% speedup (I'm totally making these numbers up), 
which disqualifies this work for an application developer as having 
deminishing return of investment.

It's not the application developer's task to avoid the death by a thousands Qt 
paper cuts. It's Qt's job.

Our job.

Thanks,
Marc

-- 
Marc Mutz <marc.mutz at kdab.com> | Senior Software Engineer
KDAB (Deutschland) GmbH & Co.KG, a KDAB Group Company
Tel: +49-30-521325470
KDAB - The Qt, C++ and OpenGL Experts



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