Hands-On High Performance Programming with Qt 5

Should we use Qt containers?

The standard advice you will hear a lot these days is not to use Qt containers, as they are old and ugly. We tend to be told to use STL classes instead.

First, as we already stated, we receive the data from Qt APIs packaged in the Qt containers, so, from a performance point of view, repackaging them into standard containers is seen as wasting resources. Anyway, Qt containers are here to stay, as Qt does not want the standard library in its API, because of backward compatibility concerns and the fear of changed standard container definitions, as in the case of GCC string implementation.

From an alternative viewpoint, standard containers offer better functionality and reportedly even Qt 5 is using them internally. ...