Efficient string concatenation

[Norbert Thiebaud]

On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 4:56 PM, Lubos Lunak <l.lunak at suse.cz> wrote:
>
>  Hello,
>
>  The work is based on threads [1] and [2] and occassionally seeing in the
> commits that people doing string cleanups sometimes change ugly code to only
> slightly less ugly code. With the new feature enabled, any string
> concatenation/creation is simply done as (well, ok, the number() part is not
> done yet, but shouldn't be difficult to add):
>
> OUString s = foo + bar + "baz" + OUString::number( many ) + "whatever";
>
> All the other alternatives, like explicit OUStringBuffer and repeated append()
> should be now worse in all possible aspects.

What is the recommended way to deal with
for()
{

}


 In fact, this should result in
> just one OUString allocation, one data copy for anything and at most one
> length computation, so it should possibly beat even strcpy+strcat, while at
> the same time looking good.
>
>  I successfully built with gcc (not the ancient Apple one though, I intend to
> pass there again), clang and msvc2010 and passed 'make check'. The resulting
> binary size is about the same (funnily enough it seems that gcc's -Os stops
> it from fully inlining, preventing it from optimizing out more stuff and
> making the code smaller).
>
>  Even though this is in sal/, the intention is to keep this code LO-internal,
> so there won't be any BIC problems, 3rd party apps will keep getting the
> original code. All O(U)String code is inline functions, so there shouldn't be
> any trouble there.
>
>  So as you can see, this would be perfect, if it weren't for some small
> gotchas:
> - since operator+ now returns a different object, this is not entirely source
> compatible, and explicit conversions to O(U)String may need to be added
> (e.g. '( a + "b" ).getStr()' -> 'OUString( a + "b" ).getStr()' ). If some of
> those cases would be too annoying, I can try harder to avoid them, but some
> are unavoidable ( ?: operator being one of them and somewhat vexing). However
> the patch 0005 patch fixing all such issues in LO is pretty small, so this
> does not currently seem to be an issue (although that may be because the idea
> of writing simple string-handling code may be catching up slowly).
> - as it is template-based, error messages can get somewhat longer, but IMO
> it's nothing horrific. Compilers with decent error reporting are
> recommended :). Alternatively, temporary "#define RTL_DISABLE_FAST_STRING" at
> the top of the source file should help too.
>
>  Still, I think it works pretty well.
>
> [1]
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2011-November/021156.html
> [2]
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2011-December/022323.html
>
> --
>  Lubos Lunak
>  l.lunak at suse.cz
>
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