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)

Representing optional values with std::optional

Although quite a minor feature in C++17, std::optional is a neat addition to the STL library which simplifies a common case which couldn't be expressed in a clean straightforward syntax prior to std::optional. In a nutshell, it is a small wrapper for any type where the wrapped type can be both initialized and uninitialized.

To put it in C++ lingo, std::optional is a stack-allocated container with a max size of one.

Note that the Boost Libraries has had an equivalent of std::optional,named boost::optional for many years.

Optional return values

Before the introduction of std::optional, there was no clear way to define functions which may not return a defined value, such as...