C++Now 2018

There seems to be a widely held belief among programmers today that efficiency no longer matters in most situations because processors are so fast and numerous and memory is so large. But from a user’s perspective computers are often slower today than they were 30 years ago despite the enormous increase in measured performance of the hardware. How can this be? If this is true, what are we doing wrong and what can we do about it? Is efficiency an everyday concern for working programmers, or is it only needed for special cases written by specialists?

In this talk we will explore these questions and consider the proposition that, contrary to popular belief, performance almost always matters and pervasive attention to efficiency is essential to ensure good performance. We will examine the efficiency tools modern C++ has to offer and discuss techniques for writing efficient code in an elegant, expressive and natural way. Topics will include tuning vs. optimizing, value semantics vs. reference semantics, unions and variants, move semantics, forwarding, container choice, in-place construction, and container node handling.