[Development] Important recent changes in QList/QString/QByteArray

[Giuseppe D'Angelo]

On 09/09/2020 10:55, Andrei Golubev wrote:
> Small update on QList::erase: the iterator invalidation model will be 
> aligned with std::vector's erase (in progress of merging the change to 
> dev and it got approved already). This means that, when erasing, only 
> the iterators that correspond to erased elements and elements after them 
> (until end()) will be invalidated*. The corner case is erasing from the 
> beginning where formal definition seems to allow right-shifting erasure 
> (feel free to prove me wrong) and the only concern I have is when 
> someone holds QList::constData()/data() pointer, since this will be 
> invalidated in the corner case.

data() is invalidated if one erases begin(), so no problem.

> 
> *- except when detach is necessary or shrinking happens

This is another against automatic shrinking; it may invalidate 
everything rather than just the erased area. I don't understand the 
"detach" part, is it about holding references across a detach, so they 
refer to the original container, not the detached one? That's not 
different from we always had, isn't it?

> As to whether we should or should not shrink when erasing too many 
> elements, there are clearly two opposite opinions (see the "replied to" 
> conversation).
> My assumption would be that shrinking in erase has some justification 
> (otherwise, why do it in the first place?). Thus, there are already 
> Qt-relevant cases that benefit from having smaller memory footprint.
> On the other hand, "please do not free memory, I still need it" use-case 
> is also justified. However, chances are that when you really need a 
> certain memory to be allocated/preserved, there is a call to 
> QList::reserve() prior to insertions/deletions. And since we do not 
> shrink in case of reserved memory, users should be safe in this case, in 
> general.

Are the new behaviors autotested for all the leaf classes, incl. things 
like detaching a reserve()d container? The usual problem is that the 
code duplication in QVector/QString/QByteArray gave them completely 
different behaviors (there's a number of bug reports open).

-- 
Giuseppe D'Angelo | giuseppe.dangelo at kdab.com | Senior Software Engineer
KDAB (France) S.A.S., a KDAB Group company
Tel. France +33 (0)4 90 84 08 53, http://www.kdab.com
KDAB - The Qt, C++ and OpenGL Experts

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