[Interest] The willy-nilly deletion of convenience, methods

[Thiago Macieira]

On Thursday, 25 March 2021 07:40:00 PDT Matthew Woehlke wrote:
> Wow, you *totally* misunderstood that.
> 
> QList in Qt5 is mostly fine (and there's always QVector if needed).
> 
> Qt 6 got rid of a useful container type.

I didn't misunderstand you. I'm disputing your assertions.

QList in Qt 5 was *not* mostly fine. It was mostly wrong and would have become 
even more wrong in Qt 6. QStringList would have been wholly bad because 
sizeof(QString) == 3 * sizeof(void*). And QList's design in trying to guess 
what the best storage strategy was flawed, leading to silent binary 
incompatibilities and possible data loss if you used Q_DECLARE_TYPEINFO to 
make your type use QList efficiently.

But even flawed designs can have some uses, I agree. It's just not strong 
enough to warrant being the default container type for Qt and being called 
QList. The *name* had to be freed.

As I said, we can bring back the container, in a fixed form. It will most 
definitely not have the hybrid model where it tries to guess which way is best 
(that was the design flaw). If you want stability of references by way of 
pointers, use this; if you don't care, use QList.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel DPG Cloud Engineering