Book Image

The Art of Writing Efficient Programs

By : Fedor G. Pikus
3 (2)
Book Image

The Art of Writing Efficient Programs

3 (2)
By: Fedor G. Pikus

Overview of this book

The great free lunch of "performance taking care of itself" is over. Until recently, programs got faster by themselves as CPUs were upgraded, but that doesn't happen anymore. The clock frequency of new processors has almost peaked, and while new architectures provide small improvements to existing programs, this only helps slightly. To write efficient software, you now have to know how to program by making good use of the available computing resources, and this book will teach you how to do that. The Art of Efficient Programming covers all the major aspects of writing efficient programs, such as using CPU resources and memory efficiently, avoiding unnecessary computations, measuring performance, and how to put concurrency and multithreading to good use. You'll also learn about compiler optimizations and how to use the programming language (C++) more efficiently. Finally, you'll understand how design decisions impact performance. By the end of this book, you'll not only have enough knowledge of processors and compilers to write efficient programs, but you'll also be able to understand which techniques to use and what to measure while improving performance. At its core, this book is about learning how to learn.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Performance Fundamentals
7
Section 2 – Advanced Concurrency
11
Section 3 – Designing and Coding High-Performance Programs

Summary

The most important lesson of this chapter is that designing data structures for concurrency is hard, and you should take every opportunity to simplify it. Application-specific restrictions on the use of the data structures can be used to make them both simpler and faster.

The first decision you must make is which parts of your code need thread safety and which do not. Often, the best solution is to give each thread its own data to work on: any data used by a single thread needs no thread-safety concerns at all. When that is not an option, look for other application-specific restrictions: do you have multiple threads modifying a particular data structure? The implementation is often simpler if there is only one writer thread. Are there any application-specific guarantees you can exploit? Do you know the maximum size of the data structure upfront? Do you need to delete data from the data structure as well as add it at the same time, or can you separate these operations in...