[Development] QtCS 2017 QtCore sessions

[Thiago Macieira]

On Tuesday, 10 October 2017 15:04:29 CEST Jean-Michaël Celerier wrote:
> > ** Wrapping std::{unordered_}map may be acceptable
> 
> Hmmm... from these benchmarks, QHash seems to regularly beat
> std::unordered_map so is it really worth it ?
> =>  https://tessil.github.io/2016/08/29/benchmark-hopscotch-map.html

The motivation for change is not performance, but security. While we don't 
think Qt applications are particularly susceptive to HashDoS attacks, our 
approach here is "we can fix this, we may as well do it".

The reason I'm benchmarking and suggesting SipHash-1-2 instead of the standard 
SipHash-2-4 is to avoid a big performance regression.

> Besides, with the Qt implementation the performance is more-or-less
> consistent across platforms ; if it were to use
> std containers with moderately advanced algorithms, there could be much
> more differences depending on the various implementations
> (the worse offender being std::regex... these damn things just don't work
> the same on any platform).

We actually have VERY different performance numbers across platforms. QHash 
currently uses the CRC32 instructions on x86 and ARM, which means the 
peformance can change significantly (4x difference measured). The same applies 
to the fixed version: the AES instructions are 5x faster than SipHash.

> More generally, since all these containers are header-only due to their
> templated nature, wouldn't it be interesting and benefiting to the greater
> C++ community to
> spin them off in their own small header-only utility library ?

That's one big concern for a Qt6 QHash that wraps std:unordered_map. We'll 
need to see what happens.

> Having an explicit choice between COW and no-COW would be valuable in many
> places where people don't want to bring large stuff like whole QtCore but
> where a few headers are OK imho;
> offering facades to std:: types with easy, readable Qt-like APIs would also
> be quite nice (ideally with a set of standard-compliant typedefs, eg
> qt::hash_map... one can dream :p).


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