Update 1/12/2015: I’ve written a follow-up to this post comparing the performance of the different parsers. I’ve also fixed a few mistakes in the code and text below. I’ve also changed my mind about QXmlSimpleReader now that I’ve found a simple way to use it.
For this past February’s CoderNight meetup, I thought I would write the solution using Qt and take the time to explore qdoc, Qt’s excellent documentation tool. So, of course, I spent all my time figuring out the three native ways to parse XML using Qt and completely ran out of time for qdoc. While researching the XML parsing, I couldn’t find any webpages addressing and comparing the methods all at once. Since then, I’ve discovered that the documentation for Qt 5 has an XBEL bookmarks example for each of the methods and you can compare those examples to get a feel for the differences, but there’s still no Qt XML parsing rosetta stone page. Here’s a shorter, incomplete comparison of the three methods.