Performance benchmarking
The easiest way to collect information about the performance of a program is to run it and measure how long it takes. Of course, we need more data than that to make any useful optimizations: it would be nice to know which parts of the program make it take that long, so we don't waste our own time optimizing the code that may be very inefficient but also takes very little time and thus does not contribute to the bottom line.
We already saw a simple example of that when we added a timer to our sample program: now we know how long the sort itself takes. That is, in a nutshell, the whole idea of benchmarking. The rest is elbow grease, instrumenting the code with timers, collecting the information, and reporting it in a useful format. Let us see what tools we have for that, starting with the timers provided by the language itself.
C++ chrono timers
C++ has some facilities that can be used to collect timing information in its chrono library. You can...
