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)

Measuring Performance

Since this is a book about writing C++ code that runs efficiently, we need to cover some basics regarding how to measure software performance and estimate algorithmic efficiency. Most of the topics in this chapter are not specific to C++, and can be used whenever you are facing a problem where performance is an issue.

We are going to learn how to estimate algorithmic efficiency using big O notation. This is essential knowledge when choosing algorithms and data structures from STL. If you are new to big O notation, this part might take some time to grasp. But don't give up! This is a very important topic to grasp in order to understand the rest of the book, and, more importantly to become a performance-aware programmer. If you want a more formal or more practical introduction to these concepts, there are plenty of books and online resources dedicated...