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The Art of Writing Efficient Programs

You're reading from   The Art of Writing Efficient Programs An advanced programmer's guide to efficient hardware utilization and compiler optimizations using C++ examples

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Product type Paperback
Published in Oct 2021
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781800208117
Length 464 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Fedor G. Pikus Fedor G. Pikus
Author Profile Icon Fedor G. Pikus
Fedor G. Pikus
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Table of Contents (18) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Section 1 – Performance Fundamentals
2. Chapter 1: Introduction to Performance and Concurrency FREE CHAPTER 3. Chapter 2: Performance Measurements 4. Chapter 3: CPU Architecture, Resources, and Performance 5. Chapter 4: Memory Architecture and Performance 6. Chapter 5: Threads, Memory, and Concurrency 7. Section 2 – Advanced Concurrency
8. Chapter 6: Concurrency and Performance 9. Chapter 7: Data Structures for Concurrency 10. Chapter 8: Concurrency in C++ 11. Section 3 – Designing and Coding High-Performance Programs
12. Chapter 9: High-Performance C++ 13. Chapter 10: Compiler Optimizations in C++ 14. Chapter 11: Undefined Behavior and Performance 15. Chapter 12: Design for Performance 16. Assessments 17. Other Books You May Enjoy

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
You have been reading a chapter from
The Art of Writing Efficient Programs
Published in: Oct 2021
Publisher: Packt
ISBN-13: 9781800208117
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