Book Image

Software Architecture with C++

By : Adrian Ostrowski, Piotr Gaczkowski
Book Image

Software Architecture with C++

By: Adrian Ostrowski, Piotr Gaczkowski

Overview of this book

Software architecture refers to the high-level design of complex applications. It is evolving just like the languages we use, but there are architectural concepts and patterns that you can learn to write high-performance apps in a high-level language without sacrificing readability and maintainability. If you're working with modern C++, this practical guide will help you put your knowledge to work and design distributed, large-scale apps. You'll start by getting up to speed with architectural concepts, including established patterns and rising trends, then move on to understanding what software architecture actually is and start exploring its components. Next, you'll discover the design concepts involved in application architecture and the patterns in software development, before going on to learn how to build, package, integrate, and deploy your components. In the concluding chapters, you'll explore different architectural qualities, such as maintainability, reusability, testability, performance, scalability, and security. Finally, you will get an overview of distributed systems, such as service-oriented architecture, microservices, and cloud-native, and understand how to apply them in application development. By the end of this book, you'll be able to build distributed services using modern C++ and associated tools to deliver solutions as per your clients' requirements.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
1
Section 1: Concepts and Components of Software Architecture
5
Section 2: The Design and Development of C++ Software
6
Architectural and System Design
10
Section 3: Architectural Quality Attributes
15
Section 4: Cloud-Native Design Principles
21
About Packt

Writing cache-friendly code

Both those types of optimization can be of use, but there's one more important thing that you need to keep in mind when working on performant systems: cache friendliness. Using flat data structures instead of node-based ones means that you need to perform less pointer chasing at runtime, which helps your performance. Using data that's contiguous in memory, regardless of whether you're reading it forward or backward, means your CPU's memory prefetcher can load it before it's used, which can often make a huge difference. Node-based data structures and the mentioned pointer chasing cause random memory access patterns that can "confuse" the prefetcher and make it impossible for it to prefetch correct data.

If you want to see some performance results, please refer to the C++ Containers Benchmark linked in the Further reading section. It compares various usage scenarios of std::vector, std::list, std::deque, and plf::colony. If...