Book Image

C++ High Performance - Second Edition

By : Björn Andrist, Viktor Sehr
5 (2)
Book Image

C++ High Performance - Second Edition

5 (2)
By: Björn Andrist, Viktor Sehr

Overview of this book

C++ High Performance, Second Edition guides you through optimizing the performance of your C++ apps. This allows them to run faster and consume fewer resources on the device they're running on without compromising the readability of your codebase. The book begins by introducing the C++ language and some of its modern concepts in brief. Once you are familiar with the fundamentals, you will be ready to measure, identify, and eradicate bottlenecks in your C++ codebase. By following this process, you will gradually improve your style of writing code. The book then explores data structure optimization, memory management, and how it can be used efficiently concerning CPU caches. After laying the foundation, the book trains you to leverage algorithms, ranges, and containers from the standard library to achieve faster execution, write readable code, and use customized iterators. It provides hands-on examples of C++ metaprogramming, coroutines, reflection to reduce boilerplate code, proxy objects to perform optimizations under the hood, concurrent programming, and lock-free data structures. The book concludes with an overview of parallel algorithms. By the end of this book, you will have the ability to use every tool as needed to boost the efficiency of your C++ projects.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
15
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16
Index

Microbenchmarking

Profiling can help us find the bottlenecks in our code. If these bottlenecks are caused by inefficient data structures (see Chapter 4, Data Structures), the wrong choice of algorithm (see Chapter 5, Algorithms), or unnecessary contention (see Chapter 11, Concurrency), these bigger issues should be addressed first. But sometimes we find a small function or a small block of code that we need to optimize, and in those cases, we can use a method called microbenchmarking. With this process we create a microbenchmark—a program that runs a small piece of code in isolation from the rest of the program. The process of microbenchmarking consists of the following steps:

  1. Find a hot spot that needs tuning, preferably using a profiler.
  2. Separate it from the rest of the code and create an isolated microbenchmark.
  3. Optimize the microbenchmark. Use a benchmarking framework to test and evaluate the code during optimization.
  4. Integrate the newly optimized...