Book Image

Hands-On Design Patterns with C++ (Second Edition) - Second Edition

By : Fedor G. Pikus
5 (1)
Book Image

Hands-On Design Patterns with C++ (Second Edition) - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Fedor G. Pikus

Overview of this book

C++ is a general-purpose programming language designed for efficiency, performance, and flexibility. Design patterns are commonly accepted solutions to well-recognized design problems. In essence, they are a library of reusable components, only for software architecture, and not for a concrete implementation. This book helps you focus on the design patterns that naturally adapt to your needs, and on the patterns that uniquely benefit from the features of C++. Armed with the knowledge of these patterns, you’ll spend less time searching for solutions to common problems and tackle challenges with the solutions developed from experience. You’ll also explore that design patterns are a concise and efficient way to communicate, as patterns are a familiar and recognizable solution to a specific problem and can convey a considerable amount of information with a single line of code. By the end of this book, you’ll have a deep understanding of how to use design patterns to write maintainable, robust, and reusable software.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with C++ Features and Concepts
5
Part 2: Common C++ Idioms
10
Part 3: C++ Design Patterns
18
Part 4: Advanced C++ Design Patterns

Local buffer optimization in detail

We have seen the applications of local buffer optimization; for simplicity, we stayed with the most basic implementation of it. This simple implementation misses several important details, which we will now highlight.

First of all, we completely neglected the alignment of the buffer. The type we used to reserve the space inside an object is char; therefore, our buffer is byte-aligned. Most data types have higher alignment requirements: the exact requirements are platform-specific, but most built-in types are aligned on their own size (double is 8-byte-aligned on a 64-bit platform such as x86). Higher alignments are needed for some machine-specific types such as packed integer or floating-point arrays for AVX instructions.

Alignment is important: depending on the processor and the code generated by the compiler, accessing memory not aligned as required by the data type can result in poor performance or memory access violations (crashes). For...