API design considerations

There are many books and articles that present best practices for API design. They usually focus on usability, clarity, and flexibility. The common guidelines, such as "make the interfaces clear and easy to use correctly" and "make it difficult to misuse the interfaces," do not directly address performance but also do not interfere with the practices that promote good performance and efficiency. In the previous section, we have addressed two important guidelines that should be remembered when designing interfaces for performance. In this section, we will explore some more specific guidelines that target performance explicitly. Many high-performance programs rely on concurrent execution, so it makes sense to address design for concurrency first.

API design for concurrency

The most important rule when designing concurrent components and their interfaces is to provide clear thread-safety guarantees. Note that "clear" does not...