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

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in the text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Of note is a new feature that allows to portably determine the cache line size for the L1 cache, std::hardware_destructive_interference_size and std::hardware_constructive_interference_size."

A block of code is set as follows:

std::vector<double> v;
… add data to v … 
std::for_each(v.begin(), v.end(),[](double& x){ ++x; });

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

Main thread: 140003570591552
Coroutine started on thread: 140003570591552
Main thread done: 140003570591552
Coroutine resumed on thread: 140003570587392
Coroutine done on thread: 140003570587392

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: "When CPU1 sees the result of the atomic write operation executed by CPU0 with the release memory order, it is guaranteed that the state of the memory, as seen by CPU1, already reflects all operations executed by CPU0 before this atomic operation."

Tips or important notes

Appear like this.