Who should attend: Programmers either using, or about to use C++ for the delivery of production code in which efficiency is a concern. Attendees are presumed to be familiar with Standard C++; that is, the support C++ provides for object-based, object-oriented, and generic programming. Expertise in the language is not required.

In this tutorial, we present a series of C++ idioms for writing efficient C++ programs. We briefly review the underlying C++ object model, and turn to design alternatives when the idioms themselves become overwhelmed (e.g., with large-scale object creation and copy). We will look at object-based design, use of the STL container classes and generic algorithms, and object-oriented programming.

These are particularly effective areas of program efficiency because (a) the idioms generally make for more readable programs, and (b) once the idioms and implementation (or object) model is internalized, the gains in efficiency come mostly for free. In this course, we'll point out areas where experienced C programmers tend to write correct but frightfully sluggish C++ code.

To make the tutorial interesting, we'll walk through successive iterations in improving the performance of a correctly working program. To make the tutorial quantitative, we'll look at some performance numbers for reference.