Performance trade-offs
Design is often the art of compromise; there are competing goals and requirements that must be balanced. In this section, we are going to talk specifically about performance-related trade-offs. You will make many such decisions when designing high-performance systems. Here are some to be aware of.
Interface design
We have witnessed the benefits of exposing implementation as little as possible throughout this chapter. But there is a tension between the freedom to optimize that we gain in doing so vs. the cost of very abstract interfaces.
This tension requires making trade-offs between optimizing different components: an interface that does not restrict the implementation in any way usually limits the client quite severely. For example, let us revisit our collection of points. What can we do without restricting its implementation? We cannot allow any insertions except at the end (the implementation may be a vector, and copying half the collection is unacceptable...
