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

Summary

We have covered a lot of complex material in this chapter. Optimizing code is a difficult but necessary skill for any modern C++ developer. The demands of machine learning, hyper-realistic games, big data analysis, and energy-efficient computing make this a very vital area to learn about for any C++ professional. We have learned that the process of performance optimization is divided into two stages.

Firstly, optimization starts with a proper performance measurement strategy, with test conditions mirroring real-world data and usage patterns. We have learned how to measure performance by various methods – studying assembler code, manual timing, source code instrumentation, and using runtime profilers. Once we have accurate measurements, we can actually understand which portions of our programs are actually slow and focus our efforts there to get the maximum improvements.The second stage involves actually modifying the program – we learned about several strategies, starting...