[Interest] 64 bit capable QVector

Alex Malyushytskyy alexmalvtk at gmail.com
Wed Sep 4 02:20:09 CEST 2013


>> While I don't want to say that STL is a bad thing (it's not bad at all),
the fact that its allocators (and, as a consequence, everything that
uses them) are by design very friendly to memory fragmentation (the
"allocate new block -> copy data -> free old block" makes it completely
impossible even to shrink a block of memory in-place) makes me a bit sad...


You meant allocators used by default.
Such problems can be solved by using custom allocators.

Regards,
    Alex




On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 4:55 PM, Constantin Makshin <cmakshin at gmail.com>wrote:

> While I don't want to say that STL is a bad thing (it's not bad at all),
> the fact that its allocators (and, as a consequence, everything that
> uses them) are by design very friendly to memory fragmentation (the
> "allocate new block -> copy data -> free old block" makes it completely
> impossible even to shrink a block of memory in-place) makes me a bit sad...
>
> On 09/04/2013 03:21 AM, Alex Malyushytskyy wrote:
> > Forgot to add,
> >
> > I am not trying to offend performance or any other aspect of Qt
> container.
> > Personally all my code related to displaying data use them.
> >
> > I just believe it is not replacement for STL.
> >
> > Regards, Alex
> >
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 4:16 PM, Alex Malyushytskyy <alexmalvtk at gmail.com
> > <mailto:alexmalvtk at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> >     >> STL is first of all an interface and there are various
> >     implementations, hence your remark about performances does not make
> >     sense.
> >
> >     It does. All implementations of STL I ever used are clear about
> >     their effectiveness, associated types and complexity guarantees.
> >
> >     >> Qt containers are far more than "just convenience" classes
> >
> >     They are designed to work within Qt only.
> >     As far as I understand they never meant to be one of implementation
> >     or replacement of STL, thus it is not provided if not counted rare
> >     exceptions .
> >     Thus these are 'convenience' classes which provide sufficient in
> >     terms of data size and performance support of tasks common for Qt.
> >
> >     I would add that Qt containers are designed  to work with Qt widgets
> >     and carry the same limitations.
> >     And until it is impossible for example to fill QCombobox the number
> >     of items which exceeds capabilities of Qt container, it does not
> >     make sense to change the containers.
> >
> >     But I disagree with "99.9% of Qt programmers don't need 64 bit
> >     containers." statement.
> >     It might be true for mobile devices , but it is false even for home
> >     desktops.
> >
> >     Even if simply counting % of software which have to handle data
> >     exceeding 32 bit limit on the home personal computer you will get
> >     higher %.
> >     Rising of interest in distributed computing including visualization
> >     probably does not meant to solve problems with low memory
> requirements.
> >
> >     I would expect most of the scientific programs need to support 64
> >     bit containers even though sometimes they might need that support
> >     occasionally .
> >
> >     Alex
> >
> >
> >
> >     On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 2:55 PM, Philippe <philwave at gmail.com
> >     <mailto:philwave at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> >         I could easily guess 99.9% of Qt programmers don't need 64 bit
> >         containers... Qt containers are far more than "just convenience"
> >         classes.
> >
> >         STL is first of all an interface and there are various
> >         implementations, hence your remark about performances does not
> >         make sense.
> >
> >         Philippe
> >
> >         On Tue, 3 Sep 2013 14:44:58 -0700
> >         Alex Malyushytskyy <alexmalvtk at gmail.com
> >         <mailto:alexmalvtk at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> >
> >             This question appears on the mailing lists since Qt 3 at
> least .
> >
> >             At one point I was disappointed with having signed int
> >             restriction, but then I decided
> >             that  QT containers are just a convenience classes which are
> >             designed to work with either widgets or data of limited size
> >             displayed
> >             by that widgets.
> >
> >             If  guaranteed performance is needed you should use STL
> anyway.
> >
> >             Regards,
> >                  Alex
> >
> >
> >             On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Constantin Makshin
> >             <cmakshin at gmail.com <mailto:cmakshin at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> >                 Thanks for the explanation, although I still don't
> >                 appreciate the choice
> >                 (mostly regarding the size, not signedness). :)
> >
> >                 On 09/03/2013 10:48 PM, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> >                 > On terça-feira, 3 de setembro de 2013 22:18:39,
> >                 Constantin Makshin wrote:
> >                 >> Could you please explain (or give a link to an article
> >                 or something like
> >                 >> that) the reasons Qt developers used to choose signed
> >                 32-bit integer for
> >                 >> this purpose?
> >                 >> Signed 32-bit container sizes, i.e. number of elements
> >                 in a container,
> >                 >> would be acceptable (considering the equation 'n *
> >                 sizeof(T)' for the
> >                 >> amount of memory consumed by the array alone) but why
> >                 use them to
> >                 >> calculate and store sizes of allocated memory blocks?
> >                 >
> >                 > For two reasons:
> >                 >
> >                 > 1) it's signed because we need negative values in
> >                 several places in the API:
> >                 > indexOf() returns -1 to indicate a value not found;
> >                 many of the "from"
> >                 > parameters can take negative values to indicate
> >                 counting from the end. So even
> >                 > if we used 64-bit integers, we'd need the signed
> >                 version of it. That's the
> >                 > POSIX ssize_t or the Qt qintptr.
> >                 >
> >                 > This also avoids sign-change warnings when you
> >                 implicitly convert unsigneds to
> >                 > signed:
> >                 >       -1 + size_t_variable            => warning
> >                 >       size_t_variable - 1             => no warning
> >                 >
> >                 > 2) it's simply "int" to avoid conversion warnings or
> >                 ugly code related to the
> >                 > use of integers larger than int.
> >                 >
> >                 > io/qfilesystemiterator_unix.cpp:
> >                 >         size_t maxPathName =
> >                 ::pathconf(nativePath.constData(), _PC_NAME_MAX);
> >                 >         if (maxPathName == size_t(-1))
> >                 >
> >                 > io/qfsfileengine.cpp:
> >                 >     if (len < 0 || len != qint64(size_t(len))) {
> >                 >
> >                 > io/qiodevice.cpp:
> >                 > qint64 QIODevice::bytesToWrite() const
> >                 > {
> >                 >     return qint64(0);
> >                 > }
> >                 >
> >                 >                     return readSoFar ? readSoFar :
> >                 qint64(-1);
> >                 >
> >                 >
> >                 >>
> >                 >> On 09/03/2013 08:42 PM, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> >                 >>> On terça-feira, 3 de setembro de 2013 19:33:47,
> >                 Mehmet Ipek wrote:
> >                 >>>> Btw, size
> >                 >>>> limit of QVector is 2^31 in 64 bit platforms too?
> >                 >>>
> >                 >>> Yes. All Qt container classes use a signed int for
> sizes.
>
>
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