Book Image

Advanced C++

By : Gazihan Alankus, Olena Lizina, Rakesh Mane, Vivek Nagarajan, Brian Price
5 (1)
Book Image

Advanced C++

5 (1)
By: Gazihan Alankus, Olena Lizina, Rakesh Mane, Vivek Nagarajan, Brian Price

Overview of this book

C++ is one of the most widely used programming languages and is applied in a variety of domains, right from gaming to graphical user interface (GUI) programming and even operating systems. If you're looking to expand your career opportunities, mastering the advanced features of C++ is key. The book begins with advanced C++ concepts by helping you decipher the sophisticated C++ type system and understand how various stages of compilation convert source code to object code. You'll then learn how to recognize the tools that need to be used in order to control the flow of execution, capture data, and pass data around. By creating small models, you'll even discover how to use advanced lambdas and captures and express common API design patterns in C++. As you cover later chapters, you'll explore ways to optimize your code by learning about memory alignment, cache access, and the time a program takes to run. The concluding chapter will help you to maximize performance by understanding modern CPU branch prediction and how to make your code cache-friendly. By the end of this book, you'll have developed programming skills that will set you apart from other C++ programmers.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
7
6. Streams and I/O

Introduction

In today's world of extremely large and complicated software systems, stability and maintainability are usually considered the major goals for most software projects, whereas optimization has not been widely seen as a worthwhile goal since the 2000s. This is because of the rapid acceleration of hardware technology that overtook software demands on a regular schedule.

For many years, it seemed like the hardware improvements would continue to keep up with the performance demands of software, but applications continued to grow larger and more complex. Low-level native-compiled languages such as C and C++ dropped in popularity compared to less performant but easier to use interpreted languages such as Python or Ruby.

By the late 2000s, though, the trend of CPU transistor count (and performance) doubling every 18 months (a consequence of Moore's Law) had stopped, and performance improvements had flattened out. The expectation of 5 to 10 GHz processors being widely available...