A comprehensive guide to help aspiring and professional C++ developers elevate the performance of their apps by allowing them to run faster and consume fewer resources
▶Book Description
C++ High Performance, Second Edition guides you through optimizing the performance of your C++ apps. This allows them to run faster and consume fewer resources on the device they're running on without compromising the readability of your codebase.
The book begins by introducing the C++ language and some of its modern concepts in brief. Once you are familiar with the fundamentals, you will be ready to measure, identify, and eradicate bottlenecks in your C++ codebase. By following this process, you will gradually improve your style of writing code. The book then explores data structure optimization, memory management, and how it can be used efficiently concerning CPU caches.
After laying the foundation, the book trains you to leverage algorithms, ranges, and containers from the standard library to achieve faster execution, write readable code, and use customized iterators. It provides hands-on examples of C++ metaprogramming, coroutines, reflection to reduce boilerplate code, proxy objects to perform optimizations under the hood, concurrent programming, and lock-free data structures. The book concludes with an overview of parallel algorithms.
By the end of this book, you will have the ability to use every tool as needed to boost the efficiency of your C++ projects.
▶What You Will Learn
-Write specialized data structures for performance-critical code
-Use modern metaprogramming techniques to reduce runtime calculations
-Achieve efficient memory management using custom memory allocators
-Reduce boilerplate code using reflection techniques
-Reap the benefits of lock-free concurrent programming
-Gain insights into subtle optimizations used by standard library algorithms
-Compose algorithms using ranges library
-Develop the ability to apply metaprogramming aspects such as constexpr, constraints, and concepts
-Implement lazy generators and asynchronous tasks using C++20 coroutines
▶Key Features
-Updated to C++20 with completely revised code and more content on error handling, benchmarking, memory allocators, and concurrent programming
-Explore the latest C++20 features including concepts, ranges, and coroutines
-Utilize C++ constructs and techniques to carry out effective data structure optimization and memory management
▶Who This Book Is For
If you're a C++ developer looking to improve the efficiency of your code or just keen to upgrade your skills to the next level, this book is for you.
▶What this book covers
- Chapter 1, A Brief Introduction to C++, introduces some important properties of C++, such as zero-cost abstractions, value semantics, const correctness, explicit ownership, and error handling. It also discusses the drawbacks of C++.
- Chapter 2, Essential C++ Techniques, outlines automatic type deduction using auto, lambda functions, move semantics, and error handling.
- Chapter 3, Analyzing and Measuring Performance, will teach you how to analyze algorithmic complexity using big O notation. The chapter also discusses how to profile your code to find hotspots and how to set up performance tests using Google Benchmark.
- Chapter 4, Data Structures, takes you through the importance of structuring data so that it can be accessed quickly. Containers from the standard library, such as std::vector, std::list, std::unordered_map, and std::priority_queue, are introduced. Finally, this chapter demonstrates how to use parallel arrays.
- Chapter 5, Algorithms, introduces the most important algorithms from the standard library. You will also learn how to use iterators and ranges, and how to implement your own generic algorithms.
- Chapter 6, Ranges and Views, will teach you how to compose algorithms using the Ranges library introduced in C++20. You will learn why views from the Ranges library are useful and some benefits of lazy evaluation.
- Chapter 7, Memory Management, focuses on safe and efficient memory management. This includes memory ownership, RAII, smart pointers, stack memory, dynamic memory, and custom memory allocators.
- Chapter 8, Compile-Time Programming, explains metaprogramming techniques using constexpr, consteval, and type traits. You will also learn how to use C++20 concepts and the new Concepts library. Finally, it provides practical examples of metaprogramming use cases, such as reflection.
- Chapter 9, Essential Utilities, will guide you through the Utilities library and how to benefit from types such as std::optional, std::any, and std::variant using compile-time programming techniques.
- Chapter 10, Proxy Objects and Lazy Evaluation, explores how proxy objects can be used to perform under-the-hood optimizations while preserving clean syntax. Additionally, some creative uses of operator-overloading are demonstrated.
- Chapter 11, Concurrency, covers the fundamentals of concurrent programming, including parallel execution, shared memory, data races, and deadlocks. It also includes an introduction to the C++ Thread support library, the Atomic library, and the C++ memory model.
- Chapter 12, Coroutines and Lazy Generators, contains a general introduction to the coroutine abstraction. You will learn how ordinary functions and coroutines are executed on the CPU using the stack and the heap. C++20 stackless coroutines are introduced and you will discover how to solve problems using generators.
- Chapter 13, Asynchronous Programming with Coroutines, introduces concurrent programming using stackless coroutines from C++20 and touches on the subject of asynchronous network programming using Boost.Asio.
- Chapter 14, Parallel Algorithms, starts by showing the complexity of writing parallel algorithms and how to measure their performance. It then demonstrates how to utilize standard library algorithms in a parallel context using execution policies.
