Chapter 1: Introduction to Performance and Concurrency
Motivation is a key ingredient of learning; thus, you must understand why, with all the advances in computing, a programmer still has to struggle to get adequate performance from their code and why success requires a deep understanding of computing hardware, programming language, and compiler capabilities. The aim of this chapter is to explain why this understanding is still necessary today.
This chapter talks about the reasons we care about the performance of programs, specifically about the reasons good performance doesn't just happen. We will learn why, in order to achieve the best performance, or sometimes even adequate performance, it is important to understand the different factors affecting performance, and the reasons for a particular behavior of the program, whether it is fast execution or slow.
In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:
- Why performance matters
- Why performance requires the programmer's attention
- What do we mean by performance?
- How to evaluate the performance
- Learning about high performance
