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

Process memory

The stack and the heap are the two most important memory segments in a C++ program. There is also static storage and thread local storage, but we will talk more about that later. Actually, to be formally correct, C++ doesn't talk about stack and heap; instead, it talks about the free store, storage classes, and the storage duration of objects. However, since the concepts of stack and heap are widely used in the C++ community, and all the implementations of C++ that we are aware of use a stack to implement function calls and manage the automatic storage of local variables, it is important to understand what stack and heap are.

In this book, I will also use the terms stack and heap rather than the storage duration of objects. I will use the terms heap and free store interchangeably and will not make any distinction between them.

Both the stack and the heap reside in the process' virtual memory space. The stack is a place where all the local variables...