The Art of Writing Efficient Programs

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 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 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 deepest, this book is about learning how to learn.