alt Hacker NewsI think it was more about binary size. There are a few sentences in the Qt containers documentation about them being "optimized to minimize code expansion".
I think it was more about binary size. There are a few sentences in the Qt containers documentation about them being "optimized to minimize code expansion".
I mean that could mean a lot of things. By default, in C++, an std::vector<float> and std::vector<int> are two entirey separate classes with distinct methods getting compiled, even though in this particular the methods would be identical. Moreover, since templates are in headers, every object file gets their own compiled copy.
I'm sure there's some cleverness in there to mitigate the problem somewhat, but the problem still fundamentally exists
You can mitigate this manually to some degree, by making the generic classes call out to non-generic functions, of which there's guaranteed to be just 1 copy. I'm guessing that's what Qt does (among other things) when mentioning this