[Development] QUtf8String{, View} (was: Re: QString and related changes for Qt 6)

[Thiago Macieira]

On Friday, 15 May 2020 03:33:28 PDT Lars Knoll wrote:
> Pretty much all uses of QL1String that I’ve seen are about ASCII only
> content. That is certainly true for Qt itself, but also to a large degree
> for our users. For those, utf-8 conversions are within 5% of latin1
> decoding. This makes it very clear to me that we should *not* have any
> special handling for ascii that require a separate API.

We don't want Latin1 content in our files. There are two reasons for having 
QLatin1String and not QAsciiString:

1) historical. It was added in 4.0 (2005) ,when a good fraction of people were 
still running 8-bit Latin1 or Latin9 as their locales. It was actually added 
as a replacemente for people writing macros like this in 3.x times:

#define L1S(x)	QString::fromLatin1(x)

Additionially, we mis-purposed the name "Ascii" in Qt to mean "locale-encoded 
strings".

2) the Latin1 codec is FAST, but only because it needs to do no error 
checking. If we had a QAsciiString class or proper US-ASCII conversion 
functions, we'd get bug reports that something with a high bit set was not 
flagged and replaced with U+FFFD Replacement Character when converted. This 
error checking is similar to the UTF-8 decoding, which would make it as fast 
as the UTF-8 decoder in terms of performance for US-ASCII content.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel System Software Products