In previous posts, we've explored relocation, trivial relocation, and their use in optimizing data structures like vector-like containers. We've also examined how trivial relocation relates to move assignments, enabling further optimization of operations like swaps and algorithms such as std::sort and std::rotate.

Qt and Trivial Relocation (Part 5)

by Giuseppe D'Angelo

From the article:

Is trivial relocation allowed in Standard C++?

That’s probably a question we should have asked as soon as we started this journey. Of course, the answer is no, it is not allowed!

Remember how trivial relocation works: we use memcpy a source object(‘s representation) into some storage, and claim that operation realizes the equivalent of move-constructing the source into that storage, plus destroying the source.

The problem is that one can’t just put data into some storage and pretend that an object exists in there. This is only allowed for a specific set of types, such as trivially copyable types. (Note that if a type is trivially copyable, then Qt automatically considers it trivially relocatable.)

However, as we have discussed, many interesting types (QString, std::vector, std::unique_ptr, …) are not trivially copyable, but they would still benefit from trivial relocatability.