Writing Efficient C++ Code

I write in C++ almost every day but never have the need to optimize for speed. Even when you write straightforward code it's already blazingly fast.

There's no mention of branch prediction, or context switching, or synchronisation. Depending on what you're doing, they could be very consequential. There's only very brief mention of parallelisation with threads and with SIMD.

High-performance programming is a big topic. The scope is far too broad for a single blog post, which naturally gives only cursory discussion of C++ and computer architecture. The article isn't bad considering, but I do think it's the wrong format. A blog series, or even a book, would be more fitting.

"This article was originally published in Polish in issue 4/2013" — a lot of excellent advice. Sad to see C++ have moved in last decade in a direction that makes writing efficient, simple low level code harder and harder :(

My latest C++ project is assessment engine covering various actuarial type things like calculates risk for insurance etc. Typical performance for bulk calculation reaches millions to 10s of millions assessments per second on 16 core server. Well there is a trick there that inside it JIT compiles rules from a DSL to an executable code. interpreter mode (used mainly for audit mode) is about 3-5 times slower which is still insanely fast

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