Book Image

C++ High Performance

By : Björn Andrist, Viktor Sehr
5 (1)
Book Image

C++ High Performance

5 (1)
By: Björn Andrist, Viktor Sehr

Overview of this book

C++ is a highly portable language and can be used to write both large-scale applications and performance-critical code. It has evolved over the last few years to become a modern and expressive language. This book will guide you through optimizing the performance of your C++ apps by allowing them to run faster and consume fewer resources on the device they're running on without compromising the readability of your code base. The book begins by helping you measure and identify bottlenecks in a C++ code base. It then moves on by teaching you how to use modern C++ constructs and techniques. You'll see how this affects the way you write code. Next, you'll see the importance of data structure optimization and memory management, and how it can be used efficiently with respect to CPU caches. After that, you'll see how STL algorithm and composable Range V3 should be used to both achieve faster execution and more readable code, followed by how to use STL containers and how to write your own specialized iterators. Moving on, you’ll get hands-on experience in making use of modern C++ metaprogramming and reflection to reduce boilerplate code as well as in working with proxy objects to perform optimizations under the hood. After that, you’ll learn concurrent programming and understand lock-free data structures. The book ends with an overview of parallel algorithms using STL execution policies, Boost Compute, and OpenCL to utilize both the CPU and the GPU.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Small size optimization

One of the great things about containers such as std::vector is that they automatically allocate dynamic memory when needed. Sometimes, though, the use of dynamic memory for container objects that only contain a few small elements can hurt the performance. It would be more efficient to keep the elements in the container itself and only use stack memory instead of allocating small regions of memory on the heap. Most modern implementations of std::string will take advantage of the fact that a lot of strings in a normal program are short and that short strings are more efficient to handle without the use of heap memory.

One alternative is to keep a small separate buffer in the string class itself, which can be used when the string content is short. This would increase the size of the string class even when the short buffer is not used. So, a more memory-efficient...