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

[Thiago Macieira]

On Thursday, 14 May 2020 07:41:45 PDT Marc Mutz via Development wrote:
> There's only our own lazyness which stands in the way of this better
> alternative.
[snip the rest]

Update:

As we're reviewing the changes Lars is making to get rid of QStringRef, Lars, 
Marc and I came to the conclusion that QUtf8StringView is required for Qt 6.0. 
That's because some methods that previously returned QStringRef now return 
QStringView and to retain compatibility with:

    if (xml.attribute("foo") == "bar")

where QXmlStreamReader::attribute() returns QStringView, we really need to 
capture that "bar" as a UTF-8 string and we ought to have optimised UTF-16 to 
UTF-8 comparisons. So we're working on it.

If it had been wrapped in QLatin1String(), there would be no compatibility 
issues, as there already is an operator==() for QStringView/QLatin1String.

There are currently no conclusions on QUtf8String and QAnyString, nor on what 
the APIs should look like.

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