Hi, quick update after further investigation.
I upgraded from Visual Studio 2019 to Visual Studio 2022 (Thanks to @hskoglund), and this gave me much more detailed Edit and Continue diagnostics.
These logs made the issue much clearer.
What I found
This does not appear to be a Qt runtime memory leak.
The bottleneck is in the MSVC Edit-and-Continue/hot reload patching workload when large executable translation units are edited.
For the same type of edit in source.cpp:
Legacy setup (Qt3-era project):
~1,542 sections processed
~1 MB remapped
patch apply time ~0.3 s
Qt6.8.3 setup (VS2022, x64, C++17):
~11,050 sections processed
~67 MB remapped
hundreds of modified/new sections (including many unwind/PDATA-related sections)
patch apply time ~25 s
So the slowdown/crash pattern is strongly correlated with:
very large source files in executable entry modules, and
much larger ENC delta/metadata in modern Qt6/C++17 builds.
Important detail
I can Edit-and-Continue my central libraries repeatedly without issue.
The failures happen mostly when modifying very large executable source files (10k+ lines).
Current conclusion
This looks like a size-dependent MSVC ENC limitation/fragility (address-space fragmentation/exhaustion during repeated remapping), rather than a Qt API feature issue.
If anyone has practical mitigation experience for large x64 Qt6 projects (compiler/linker/debug settings, ENC-friendly code organization, etc.), I’m very interested.
Thanks again for all suggestions.