[Interest] Building strings with .arg() (arrrgh)

[Max Paperno]

HI folks,

I'm confused about a "best" way to use .arg() with fixed/static strings 
(not tr()). Or if it should be used at all, for that matter, in terms of 
efficiency.

QStringLiteral seemed pretty good to me after reading several blog posts
(from Marc Mutz, Kai Koehne, Olivier Goffart, among others), all of 
which are mentioned on Qtforum post [Create QString with QStringLiteral 
and arg][1] along with some opinions.

Then found the [HEADS-UP: QStringLiteral][2] post by Marc on the 
development list and didn't feel so good about it anymore. Specifically 
where he says that using it with .arg() is an "anti-pattern" but not in 
any way that I can understand (vs. just using QString). I went through 
that whole meandering thread but didn't see string builder stuff brought 
up again.

It also mentions (and I found other references) that QStringView and 
QLatin1String have .arg() methods, albeit w/out number formatting. 
Which I can see in the code, but aren't documented anywhere AFAICT. Nor 
can I find when these methods became available. I'm hesitant to use 
undocumented methods (though it wouldn't be the first time) and would 
prefer to maintain as much compatibility with older Qt versions as 
possible/reasonable. More importantly, I have no idea what doing 
something like QLatin1String("foo %1").arg(myQstring) would even mean.

OTOH I found a number of code examples here and there (including KDE 
code, like Konsole) where people specifically changed 
QString("%1").arg() calls to use QStringLiteral instead.

Also I'm not clear if using QStringLiteral with + (or %) operators is 
also an "anti-pattern"... I understand the methods like append() can 
make more efficient use of QLatin1String, but does a plain quote-wrapped 
char literal get implicitly converted to QString when used e.g. like:

"Value of " + myQstring + " is: " + QString::number(x);

Would it be more efficient to wrap those literals in a QStringLiteral, 
QLatin1String, QStringView (or u""), or just leave them bare?

Realizing that "best" is subjective, and thinking of a specific project 
I'm working on, my goals, in order of importance, are, roughly:

1) Stability; 2) Minimal CPU time (fast, some of this could be used 
within animations and such); 3) Runtime memory use; 4) Clean code; 5) 
Size of produced binary.

In many cases I'm just building strings for error/warning/status 
messages (but not QDebug streams, although they may end up as debug 
output eventually, or never be seen at all). And these don't, or 
shouldn't, happen very often at runtime. But in some cases the stings 
will be used internally by other code. In most (if not all) cases I 
don't care about UTF encoding, plain ASCII/L1 is fine.  But there are 
often numerical types involved which need to be converted to strings 
somehow. And other strings to be inserted (with .arg()) are often 
QStrings (from Qt lib code or whatever). The built strings are typically 
passed on to other functions (as const QString &) for further processing 
or possible display to the user/downstream developer.

What's a programmer to do?  Does it even matter? Is there a faster way 
to build strings (within reason... yes I could just use C-level code but 
let's not get carried away).

Thanks!
-Max


[1]: 
https://forum.qt.io/topic/86964/create-qstring-with-qstringliteral-and-arg/8
[2]: 
https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2019-August/037145.html