CppCon 2014: Chandler Carruth "Efficiency with Algorithms, Performance with Data Structures"

There are many things in the standard C++ library which are named incorrectly (std::string), awkwardly (std::unordered_map) and and implemented inefficiently from the perspective of modern CPUs (same std::unordered_map, which uses linked list for the underlying hash table buckets). See the great talk on CppCon 2014 about those issues - [VIDEO] .

Strongly agree. That's perhaps less true for the software I work on these days (lapack), but I've seen that so many times over my career. I'm also a big fan of "Efficiency with Algorithms, Performance with Data Structures" by Chandler Carruth at CppCon 2014. [VIDEO]

Chandler Carruth's CPPCon talk [0] this year was also great (surprisingly, as I had a fairly low opinion of most of the others). It wasn't better than Mike Acton's [1], but I suspect that it was more actionable for most devs. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]

Also, those allocations imply linked, rather than contiguous, data structures, which (often? always?) imply poor cache interaction, which is a major source of inefficiency. Would love some more perspectives on this, as I've just watched a couple cppcon talks ([0], [1]) and I'm feeling a bit drunk on the kool-aid. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]

Here's a few: - "Tuning C++: Benchmarks, and CPUs, and Compilers! Oh My!" [LINK] - "Understanding Compiler Optimization" [LINK] - "Optimizing the Emergent Structures of C++" [LINK] - "Efficiency with Algorithms" [VIDEO] The first one is really good if you've never benchmarked anything in a Linux environment. Or if you otherwise want to learn how to investigate how C++ gets turned into machine code.

STL is not inherently slow per se, some data structures are just not fast on modern CPUs, so they have to be chosen wisely. Here is good talk: [VIDEO] .

Yes, if you write performance sensitive code you have to be very careful with dictionaries. See for example this nice talk by Chandler Carruth [VIDEO]

If you haven't already seen it, you'd probably really enjoy Chandler Carruth's "Efficiency with Algorithms, Performance with Data Structures" talk from CppCon 2014: [VIDEO]