The great free lunch of "performance taking care of itself" is over. Until recently, programs got faster by themselves as CPUs were upgraded, but that doesn't happen anymore. The clock frequency of new processors has almost peaked, and while new architectures provide small improvements to existing programs, this only helps slightly. To write efficient software, you now have to know how to program by making good use of the available computing resources, and this book will teach you how to do that.
The Art of Efficient Programming covers all the major aspects of writing efficient programs, such as using CPU resources and memory efficiently, avoiding unnecessary computations, measuring performance, and how to put concurrency and multithreading to good use. You'll also learn about compiler optimizations and how to use the programming language (C++) more efficiently. Finally, you'll understand how design decisions impact performance.
By the end of this book, you'll not only have enough knowledge of processors and compilers to write efficient programs, but you'll also be able to understand which techniques to use and what to measure while improving performance. At its core, this book is about learning how to learn.
publication date
2021-10-22
what you will learn
Discover how to use the hardware computing resources in your programs effectively
Understand the relationship between memory order and memory barriers
Familiarize yourself with the performance implications of different data structures and organizations
Assess the performance impact of concurrent memory accessed and how to minimize it
Discover when to use and when not to use lock-free programming techniques
Explore different ways to improve the effectiveness of compiler optimizations
Design APIs for concurrent data structures and high-performance data structures to avoid inefficiencies
key features
Learn proven techniques from a heavyweight and recognized expert in C++ and high-performance computing * Understand the limitations of modern CPUs and their performance impact * Find out how you can avoid writing inefficient code and get the best optimizations from the compiler * Learn the tradeoffs and costs of writing high-performance programs
approach
This book presents you with all the important techniques and tools to measure the performance of your existing programs and systematically improve them. Every chapter includes hands-on examples to help you understand the concepts.
audience
This book is for experienced developers and programmers who work on performance-critical projects and want to learn new techniques to improve the performance of their code. Programmers in algorithmic trading, gaming, bioinformatics, computational genomics, or computational fluid dynamics communities will get the most out of the examples in this book, but the techniques are fairly universal. Although this book uses the C++ language, the concepts demonstrated in the book can be easily transferred or applied to other compiled languages such as C, Java, Rust, Go, and more.
short description
This book takes you through a systematic study of every aspect involved in improving the performance of your programs. It provides you with solutions to a range of performance-related troubleshooting scenarios and equips you with the knowledge and tools necessary for writing efficient programs while building performance-intensive applications.
subtitle
An advanced programmer's guide to efficient hardware utilization and compiler optimizations using C++ examples
keywords
C++ programming; C++ programming language; Concurrent programming; Parallel programming; Practical programming; Basic programming; How to code
Product ISBN
9781800208117
