This book expects you to have a basic knowledge of C++ and computer architecture and a genuine interest in evolving your skills. Hopefully, by the time you finish this book, you will have gained a few insights into how you can improve your C++ applications, both performance-wise and syntactically. On top of that, we also hope that you will have a few aha moments.

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, Modern C++ Concepts, outlines automatic type deduction using auto, lambda functions, move semantics, std::optional, and std::any.

Chapter 3, Measuring Performance, discusses asymptotic complexity and big O notation, practical performance testing, and how to profile your code to find hotspots.

Chapter 4, Data Structures, takes you through the importance of structuring the data so that it can be accessed quickly. STL containers such as std::vector, std::list, std::unordered_map, and std::priority_queue are introduced. Finally, we describe how to iterate over parallel arrays.

Chapter 5, A Deeper Look at Iterators, dives into the concept of iterators, and shows how iterators can go beyond just referring to objects in containers.

Chapter 6, STL Algorithms and Beyond, shows the obvious, and the not so obvious, advantages of STL algorithms over hand rolled for loops. It also takes a look at the limitations of STL algorithms and how the new Ranges library overcomes these limits.

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, Metaprogramming and Compile-Time Evaluation, explains metaprogramming concepts such as constexpr, heterogeneous containers, type_traits, std::enable_if, and std::is_detected. It also gives practical examples of metaprogramming use cases, such as reflection.

Chapter 9, 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 10, 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 11, Parallel STL, starts by showing the complexity of writing parallel algorithms. It then demonstrates how to utilize STL algorithms in a parallel context using the parallel extensions for STL and Boost Compute.

To get the most out of this book, you need to have a basic knowledge of C++. It's preferable if you have already been facing problems related to performance and are now looking for new tools and practices to have ready the next time you need to work with performance and C++.

There are a lot of code examples in this book. Some are taken from the real world, but most of them are artificial or vastly simplified examples to prove a concept rather than providing you with production-ready code. We have put all the code examples in source files divided by chapter so that it is fairly easy to find the examples you want to experiment with. If you open up the source code files, you will note that we have replaced most of the main() functions from the examples with test cases written with Google Test framework. We hope that this will help you rather than confuse you. It allowed us to write helpful descriptions for each example, and it also makes it easier to run all the examples from one chapter at once.

In order to compile and run the examples, you will need the following:

The CMake script provided with the example code will download and install further dependencies such as Boost, OpenCL, and Google Test.

During the writing of this book, it has been of great help for us to use Compiler Explorer, which is available at https://godbolt.org/. Compiler Explorer is an online compiler service that lets you try various compilers and versions. Try it out if you haven't already!

#include <iostream>

auto main() -> int {
  std::cout << "High Performance C++\n";
}

#include <iostream>

auto main() -> int {
std::cout << "High Performance C++\n";
}

$ clang++ -std=c++17 high_performance.cpp
$ ./a.out
$ High Performance C++

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