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

Fedor G. Pikus

£7.99 ~~£26.99~~

4.3 (24 Ratings)

eBook Oct 2021 464 pages 1st Edition

Fedor G. Pikus

£7.99 ~~£26.99~~

4.3 (24 Ratings)

eBook Oct 2021 464 pages 1st Edition

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Key benefits

Learn proven techniques from a heavyweight and recognized expert in C++ and high-performance computing
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

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, and while new architectures provide small improvements to existing programs, this only helps slightly. 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 Art of Efficient Programming 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.

Who is this book for?

This book is for experienced developers and programmers who work on performance-critical projects and want to learn new techniques to improve the performance of their code. Programmers in algorithmic trading, gaming, bioinformatics, computational genomics, or computational fluid dynamics communities will get the most out of the examples in this book, but the techniques are fairly universal. 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.

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

What do you get with eBook?

Instant access to your Digital eBook purchase

Download this book in EPUB and PDF formats

Access this title in our online reader with advanced features

DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want

AI Assistant (beta) to help accelerate your learning

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Sara Caso Conde Nov 17, 2021

I've wanted a book like this for a long time which examines the subject clearly and thoroughly from a modern perspective...a joy to read.

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Priya R Shastri Oct 22, 2021

The book “The art of writing efficient programs by Fedor G. Pikusis for experienced developers and programmers who want to learn different methods to improve the performance of their code. The developers who are involved in computer modeling, algorithmic trading and genomics can gain a lot from this book.The first section of the book describes the progress that computing power has made over the years from taking 10 hrs to solve problems in 2008 to less than 1 hour in 2018 and even faster today in 2021. So all this optimization is because of improvement in technologies in software and optimized algorithms.In chapter 1 the author introduces performance and efficiency. Efficient programs make good use of the computational hardware. High performance requires choosing the right CPU, writing the code to execute the program, avoiding unnecessary computations. In chapter 2 the author discusses performance measurements. The first rule is never guess about performance. This chapter describes the tool google-pprof that times each system call that the compiler takes to process. The perf profiler, and C++ chrono timers are described in this section. In chapter 3 the author describes how to make use of CPU resources effectively. In chapter 4 the author discusses memory optimization and concurrency. The spectre error is discussed in memory optimization. The use of mutexes to control the critical section of the code is important to determine the correct order in which the criticl section of the code is serviced. In chapter 5 threads, memory and concurrency a detailed discussion od multi threading fundamentals is done. In chapter 6 concurrency and performance the discussion of parallel programs and performing lock free optimizations are discussed. In chapter 7 data structures for concurrency are discussed.Chapter 8 discusses concurrency in C++Chapter 9 discusses high performance optimizations in C++. Chapter 10 discusses compiler optimizations for C++. Avoiding unnecessary memory allocation and memory fragmentation in programs. Allocate memory in chunks of 64KB. Chapter 11 discusses undefined behaviour and performance. undefined behaviour happens when the program behaves in a manner different from that which is specified. Chapter 12 discuess design for performance.Overall this book is highly recommended for CPU enthusiasts and programmers in the area of high performance computing. When speed is all that matters for solving critical problems this is an excellent resource to use.

Ory Chowaw-Liebman Feb 14, 2022

The book provides in-depth guide to writing high performance software, with many code examples. Every software engineer who needs to get the most out of their software and hardware should look into this.

Monalisa and Arindam Mar 04, 2023

This is a book that needed to be written. Sure there are books that speak in depth about the entire performance toolchain on Linux, and there are books that talk of the general principles behind measuring CPU, memory, etc. But none of those books are a good first step. This one is, but it doesn't stop there. It teaches you the tools of the trade with very, very good explanations that come out of a solid understanding of the subject. I am impressed by the array of topics that Packt is going after while other more established publishing houses are putting out weak content more frequently. Kudos to the author and the publisher.

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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