QCharRef/QByteRef: warn when triggering the resizing operator= behavior

The whole reason of QCharRef/QByteRef existence is to have a magic
operator=. This operator= delays the actual detach up to
the moment something is written into the Ref, thus avoiding
spurious detaches to the underlying string/byte array.

operator= has also an extra feature, it allows this code to
succeed:

  QString s("abc");
  s[10] = 'z';
  assert(s == "abc      z");

This last behavior is *extremely* surprising.

The problem with all of this is that this extra convenience is
outweighted by the massive pessimization in the codegen for
operator[]; by the maintenance burden (QChar APIs need to be
mirrored in QCharRef, etc.), and, for the automatic resize, by the
fact that it's an super-niche use case.

Cherry on top, std::basic_string does not do that, and no Qt or std
container does that. In other words: any other container-like class
exhibits UB for out of bounds access.

We can't just go and change behavior, though. This is something
coming all the way back from Qt 2 (maybe even Qt 1), which means we
can't deprecate it at short notice.

This patch simply adds a warning in debug builds in case the special
resizing behavior is triggered. While at it, removes some code
duplication in QByteRef.

[ChangeLog][QtCore][QString] The behavior of operator[] to allow
implicit resizing of the string has been deprecated, and will be
removed in a future version of Qt.

[ChangeLog][QtCore][QByteArray] The behavior of operator[] to allow
implicit detaching and resizing of the byte array has been
deprecated, and will be removed in a future version of Qt.

Change-Id: I3b5c5191167f12a606bcf6e513e6f304b220d675
Reviewed-by: Marc Mutz <marc.mutz@kdab.com>
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 4 deletions

diff --git a/src/corelib/doc/snippets/code/src_corelib_tools_qbytearray.cpp b/src/corelib/doc/snippets/code/src_corelib_tools_qbytearray.cpp
index ec63e64fe9..11ab50687d 100644
--- a/src/corelib/doc/snippets/code/src_corelib_tools_qbytearray.cpp
+++ b/src/corelib/doc/snippets/code/src_corelib_tools_qbytearray.cpp
@@ -133,10 +133,10 @@ while (*data) {
 
 
 //! [9]
-QByteArray ba;
-for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i)
-    ba[i] = 'A' + i;
-// ba == "ABCDEFGHIJ"
+QByteArray ba("Hello, world");
+cout << ba[0]; // prints H
+ba[7] = 'W';
+// ba == "Hello, World"
 //! [9]