Common Systems Programming Optimizations and Tricks

https://paulcavallaro.com/blog/common-systems-programming-optimizations-tricks/

by ptc • 7 years ago

9 1 7 years ago

ncmncm• 7 years ago

A discussion of systems programming optimization that doesn't start with single-writer ring buffers starts on the wrong foot.

Those other tricks are excellent, and I use all of them, in cases where they work at all. But, e.g., seeking a way not to need to take a lock at all should come before discovering a low-contention locking protocol.

Readers should note that packing spare bits into the bottom bits of suitably aligned pointers is more portable than using high bits. Any page-aligned pointer has at least 12 bits free at the bottom, and any malloc'd pointer has at least 2, often 4.

Ring buffer counters into a power-of-2 sized buffer can be incremented without bound, enabling use of ordinary arithmetic on them, and high bits masked off cheaply on each use.

Probably the most neglected primitive data structure is the bitmapped set. A `uint32_t` gives you a universe of 32 elements; a byte is enough for the days of the week. The popcount native instruction is very valuable here, usually expressed as `__builtin_popcount` in source code. C++98's `std::bitset` provides Standard, portable access to it, but C++20 offers `std::popcount` directly.

Common Systems Programming Optimizations and Tricks

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