[Development] HEADS-UP: QStringLiteral

[Edward Welbourne]

Lars Knoll (22 August 2019 13:55)
> The problem with our multitude of string classes is not only that
> we’re overcomplicating our API, but also that we’re adding
> implementation complexity for ourselves that we will need to maintain
> over the years to come. I would very much wish that we could find ways
> to reduce that complexity with Qt 6.

+1.

> And I’d be willing to pay with a few additional CPU cycles here and
> there to achieve that.

The complication is that, unless you have a *very* liberal meaning of "a
few", that's not the choice you're faced with.  Converting from UTF-8
sure looks a lot more expensive (from what I've seen of the code) than
converting from ISO-Latin-1.

OTOH, if we could bear the heavy burden of using u"..." for strings
where we care about speed more than size, u8"..." for those where the
content isn't pure ASCII but we care about size more than speed, and
accept only ever using plain old C "..."  when its contents are pure
ASCII, I think we can realistically hope to achieve some significant
simplifications.

	Eddy.