Before the OpenSSL3 mode was added, these operations were the same. The placement-new of the active union member was arguably not even necessary, as just naming it should start their lifetime; certainly all initialization was vacuous, anyway. So it didn't really matter that we re-did it on each reset(). But OpenSSL3 mode is different: initialization allocates (and can fail) whereas reset() does not¹, so it makes sense to separate them, so as to re-establish the lost proper noexcept'ness of reset(). ¹ or so we assume This will also help when moving the EVP members into the union later. Pick-to: 6.5 Change-Id: Id1c9a00cddb95fb2235162409c2301dd4c35228a Reviewed-by: Mårten Nordheim <marten.nordheim@qt.io>