Who should attend: Systems designers, programmers, and technical managers involved in the design, implementation, and maintenance of production libraries and applications using C++. You should be familiar with the basic features of C++ (e.g., classes, inheritance, virtual functions, templates), but expertise is not required.

What you will learn: What is really important to deliver high performance in C++ and the techniques you need to achieve it.

This course will examine the factors that affect the performance of C++. The reasons for bottlenecks in C++ programs can be surprising. Contrary to popular belief, virtual functions usually exact a negligible performance cost, while unexpected calls to constructors and destructors frequently hamstring applications. Much of the material in this course is taken from Scott's books, Effective C++ and More Effective C++.

Topics include:

- General approaches to efficiency

• Choosing suitable algorithms and data structures
• The 80-20 rule and program profiling
• Lazy evaluation and reference counting
• Prefetching and caching

• Eliminating unnecessary temporary objects
• Mastering inlining
• Using handle classes to minimize compilation dependencies
• Writing custom memory managers
• Implementing reference-counting

Scott Meyers is the author of Effective C++ and More Effective C++. He is a former columnist for the C++ Report, and a frequent writer, speaker, and consultant on C++ software development. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Brown University and his research on software development has been reported in technical journals and at conferences around the world.

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