The Art of Writing Efficient Programs: An advanced programmer’s guide to efficient hardware utilization and compiler optimizations using C++ examples

Length: 452 pages
Edition: 1
Language: English
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Publication Date: 2021-10-22
ISBN-10: 1800208111
ISBN-13: 9781800208117
Sales Rank: #387769 (See Top 100 Books)

Get to grips with various performance improvement techniques such as concurrency, lock-free programming, atomic operations, parallelism, and memory management

Key Features

Understand the limitations of modern CPUs and their performance impact
Find out how you can avoid writing inefficient code and get the best optimizations from the compiler
Learn the tradeoffs and costs of writing high-performance programs

Book Description

The great free lunch of “performance taking care of itself” is over. Until recently, programs got faster by themselves as CPUs were upgraded, but that doesn’t happen anymore. The clock frequency of new processors has almost peaked. New architectures provide small improvements to existing programs, but this only helps slightly. Processors do get larger and more powerful, but most of this new power is consumed by the increased number of processing cores and other “extra” computing units. To write efficient software, you now have to know how to program by making good use of the available computing resources, and this book will teach you how to do that.

The book covers all the major aspects of writing efficient programs, such as using CPU resources and memory efficiently, avoiding unnecessary computations, measuring performance, and how to put concurrency and multithreading to good use. You’ll also learn about compiler optimizations and how to use the programming language (C++) more efficiently. Finally, you’ll understand how design decisions impact performance.

By the end of this book, you’ll not only have enough knowledge of processors and compilers to write efficient programs, but you’ll also be able to understand which techniques to use and what to measure while improving performance. At its core, this book is about learning how to learn.

What you will learn

Discover how to use the hardware computing resources in your programs effectively
Understand the relationship between memory order and memory barriers
Familiarize yourself with the performance implications of different data structures and organizations
Assess the performance impact of concurrent memory accessed and how to minimize it
Discover when to use and when not to use lock-free programming techniques
Explore different ways to improve the effectiveness of compiler optimizations
Design APIs for concurrent data structures and high-performance data structures to avoid inefficiencies

Who this book is for

This book is for experienced developers and programmers who work on performance-critical projects and want to learn different techniques to improve the performance of their code. Programmers who belong to algorithmic trading, gaming, bioinformatics, computational genomics, or computational fluid dynamics communities can learn various techniques from this book and apply them in their domain of work.

Although this book uses the C++ language, the concepts demonstrated in the book can be easily transferred or applied to other compiled languages such as C, Java, Rust, Go, and more.

Introduction to Performance and Concurrency
Performance Measurements
CPU Architecture, Resources, and Performance Implications
Memory Architecture and Performance
Threads, Memory, and Concurrency
Concurrency and Performance
Data Structures for Concurrency
Concurrency in C++
High-Performance C++
Compiler Optimizations in C++
Undefined Behavior and Performance
Design for Performance

The Art of Writing Efficient Programs
Contributors
About the author
About the reviewer
Preface
    Who is this book for?
    What this book covers
    To get the most out of this book
    Download the example code files
    Download the color images
    Conventions used
    Get in touch
    Share Your Thoughts
Section 1 – Performance Fundamentals
Chapter 1: Introduction to Performance and Concurrency
    Why focus on performance?
    Why performance matters
    What is performance?
        Performance as throughput
        Performance as power consumption
        Performance for real-time applications
        Performance as dependent on context
    Evaluating, estimating, and predicting performance
    Learning about high performance
    Summary
    Questions
Chapter 2: Performance Measurements
    Technical requirements
    Performance measurements by example
    Performance benchmarking
        C++ chrono timers
        High-resolution timers
    Performance profiling
        The perf profiler
        Detailed profiling with perf
        The Google Performance profiler
        Profiling with call graphs
        Optimization and inlining
        Practical profiling
    Micro-benchmarking
        Basics of micro-benchmarking
        Micro-benchmarking and compiler optimizations
        Google Benchmark
        Micro-benchmarks are lies
    Summary
    Questions
Chapter 3: CPU Architecture, Resources, and Performance
    Technical requirements
    The performance begins with the CPU
    Probing performance with micro-benchmarks
        Visualizing instruction-level parallelism
    Data dependencies and pipelining
    Pipelining and branches
        Branch prediction
        Profiling for branch mispredictions
    Speculative execution
    Optimization of complex conditions
    Branchless computing
        Loop unrolling
        Branchless selection
        Branchless computing examples
    Summary
    Questions
Chapter 4: Memory Architecture and Performance
    Technical requirements
    The performance begins with the CPU but does not end there
    Measuring memory access speed
        Memory architecture
        Measuring memory and cache speeds
    The speed of memory: the numbers
        The speed of random memory access
        The speed of sequential memory access
        Memory performance optimizations in hardware
    Optimizing memory performance
        Memory-efficient data structures
        Profiling memory performance
        Optimizing algorithms for memory performance
    The ghost in the machine
        What is Spectre?
        Spectre by example
        Spectre, unleashed
    Summary
    Questions
Chapter 5: Threads, Memory, and Concurrency
    Technical requirements
    Understanding threads and concurrency
        What is a thread?
        Symmetric multi-threading
        Threads and memory
        Memory-bound programs and concurrency
    Understanding the cost of memory synchronization
    Why data sharing is expensive
    Learning about concurrency and order
        The need for order
        Memory order and memory barriers
        Memory order in C++
    Memory model
    Summary
    Questions
Section 2 – Advanced Concurrency
Chapter 6: Concurrency and Performance
    Technical requirements
    What is needed to use concurrency effectively?
    Locks, alternatives, and their performance
        Lock-based, lock-free, and wait-free programs
        Different locks for different problems
        Lock-based versus lock-free, what is the real difference?
    Building blocks for concurrent programming
        The basics of concurrent data structures
        Counters and accumulators
        Publishing protocol
        Smart pointers for concurrent programming
    Summary
    Questions
Chapter 7: Data Structures for Concurrency
    Technical requirements
    What is a thread-safe data structure?
        The best kind of thread safety
        The real thread safety
    The thread-safe stack
        Interface design for thread safety
        Performance of mutex-guarded data structures
        Performance requirements for different uses
        Stack performance in detail
        Performance estimates for synchronization schemes
        Lock-free stack
    The thread-safe queue
        Lock-free queue
        Non-sequentially consistent data structures
        Memory management for concurrent data structures
    The thread-safe list
        Lock-free list
    Summary
    Questions
Chapter 8: Concurrency in C++
    Technical requirements
    Concurrency support in C++11
    Concurrency support in C++17
    Concurrency support in C++20
        The foundations of coroutines
        Coroutine C++ syntax
        Coroutine examples
    Summary
    Questions
Section 3 – Designing and Coding High-Performance Programs
Chapter 9: High-Performance C++
    Technical requirements
    What is the efficiency of a programming language?
    Unnecessary copying
        Copying and argument passing
        Copying as an implementation technique
        Copying to store data
        Copying of return values
        Using pointers to avoid copying
        How to avoid unnecessary copying
    Inefficient memory management
        Unnecessary memory allocations
        Memory management in concurrent programs
        Avoiding memory fragmentation
    Optimization of conditional execution
    Summary
    Questions
Chapter 10: Compiler Optimizations in C++
    Technical requirements
    Compilers optimizing code
        Basics of compiler optimizations
        Function inlining
        What does the compiler really know?
        Lifting knowledge from runtime to compile time
    Summary
    Questions
Chapter 11: Undefined Behavior and Performance
    Technical requirements
    What is undefined behavior? 
    Why have undefined behavior?
    Undefined behavior and C++ optimization
    Using undefined behavior for efficient design
    Summary
    Questions
Chapter 12: Design for Performance
    Technical requirements
    Interaction between the design and performance 
    Design for performance
        The minimum information principle
        The maximum information principle
    API design considerations
        API design for concurrency
        Copying and sending data
    Design for optimal data access
    Performance trade-offs
        Interface design
        Component design
        Errors and undefined behavior
    Making informed design decisions
    Summary
    Questions
Assessments
    Chapter 1:
    Chapter 2:
    Chapter 3:
    Chapter 4:
    Chapter 5:
    Chapter 6:
    Chapter 7:
    Chapter 8:
    Chapter 9:
    Chapter 10:
    Chapter 11:
    Chapter 12:
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