Efficient C++ Performance Programming Techniques

Key Points

• Literal arguments and inlining, when combined, provide significant opportunities for a compiler to provide significant performance improvements.

• Inlining may backfire, and overly aggressive inlining will almost certainly do so. Inlining can increase code size. Large code size suffers a higher rate of cache misses and page faults than smaller code.

• Nontrivial inlining decisions should be based on sample execution profiles, not gut feelings.

• Consider rewriting high frequency methods with large static size and small dynamic size to extract their significant dynamic characteristic, and then inline the dynamic component.

• Trivial and singleton methods can always be inlined.