While we wait for CppCon 2015 in September, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2014. Here is today’s feature:

Optimization Tips - Mo' Hustle Mo' Problems

by Andrei Alexandrescu

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Reasonably-written C++ code will be naturally fast. This is to C++'s excellent low-penalty abstractions and a memory model close to the machine.

However, a large category of applications have no boundaries on desired speed, meaning there's no point of diminishing returns in making code faster. Better speed means less power consumed for the same work, more workload with the same data center expense, better features for the end user, more features for machine learning, better analytics, and more.

Optimizing has always been an art, and in particular optimizing C++ on contemporary hardware has become a task of formidable complexity. This is because modern hardware has a few peculiarities about it that are not sufficiently understood and explored. This talk discusses a few such effects, and guides the attendee on how to navigate design and implementation options in search for better performance.