Efficient C++ Performance Programming Techniques

Key Points

• Constructors and destructors may be as efficient as hand-crafted C code. In practice, however, they often contain overhead in the form of superfluous computations.

• The construction (destruction) of an object triggers recursive construction (destruction) of parent and member objects. Watch out for the combinatorial explosion of objects in complex hierarchies. They make construction and destruction more expensive.

• Make sure that your code actually uses all the objects that it creates and the computations that they perform. We would encourage people to peer inside the classes that they use. This advice is not going to be popular with OOP advocates. OOP, after all, preaches the use of classes as encapsulated black-box entities and discourages ...