There are a number of sources of information on the usage and behavioral differences of the many “smart pointer” options offered by Qt. But one thing I couldn’t find enough information on were the performance characteristics.
In a recent python project where I was sending multiple messages per second of data over a basic socket, I had initially just grabbed the cPickle module to get the prototype proof-of-concept functioning properly. cPickle is awesome for easily serializing more complex python objects like custom classes, even though in my case I am only sending basic types.