Book Image

Advanced C++

By : Gazihan Alankus, Olena Lizina, Rakesh Mane, Vivek Nagarajan, Brian Price
5 (1)
Book Image

Advanced C++

5 (1)
By: Gazihan Alankus, Olena Lizina, Rakesh Mane, Vivek Nagarajan, Brian Price

Overview of this book

C++ is one of the most widely used programming languages and is applied in a variety of domains, right from gaming to graphical user interface (GUI) programming and even operating systems. If you're looking to expand your career opportunities, mastering the advanced features of C++ is key. The book begins with advanced C++ concepts by helping you decipher the sophisticated C++ type system and understand how various stages of compilation convert source code to object code. You'll then learn how to recognize the tools that need to be used in order to control the flow of execution, capture data, and pass data around. By creating small models, you'll even discover how to use advanced lambdas and captures and express common API design patterns in C++. As you cover later chapters, you'll explore ways to optimize your code by learning about memory alignment, cache access, and the time a program takes to run. The concluding chapter will help you to maximize performance by understanding modern CPU branch prediction and how to make your code cache-friendly. By the end of this book, you'll have developed programming skills that will set you apart from other C++ programmers.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
7
6. Streams and I/O

Further Optimizations

Several other techniques exist that can be implemented as you code; some of them are not guaranteed to produce better code, but it takes very little effort to change your coding habits to do these reflexively. They cost nothing but may result in gains. A few of these techniques are as follows:

  • Pass parameters that are not primitive types by const reference when possible. Even though move constructors can make copying inexpensive, they still involve more overhead than using a const reference.
  • Use pre-increment (++i) or pre-decrement (--i) operators rather than the postfix versions. This usually has no utility for simple types such as integers but may do so for complex types with a custom increment operator. Getting into a habit of writing ++i rather than i++ is good practice unless post-increment is actually the desired behavior. Apart from performance benefits, such code declares the intent more clearly by using the right operator.
  • Declare variables as...