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)

Properties of computer memory

Before we start walking through the STL containers and some other useful data structures, we will briefly discuss some properties of computer memory.

C++ treats memory as a sequence of cells. The size of each cell is one byte, and each cell has an address. Accessing a byte in memory by its address is a constant time operation, O(1), that is independent of the total number of memory cells. On a 32-bit machine, one can theoretically address 232 bytes, that is, around 4 GB, which restricts the amount of memory a process is allowed to use at once. On a 64-bit machine, one can theoretically address 264 bytes, which is so big that there is hardly any risk of running out of addresses.

The following image shows a sequence of memory cells laid out in memory. Each cell contains eight bits. The hexadecimal numbers are the addresses of the memory cells:

A sequence...