Understanding Performant Programs

In this introductory chapter, we'll start this book with some general discussions about program performance: why it's important, what are the factors that determine it, and how programmers generally go about performance themes. We'll begin with a broad discussion of performances' relevance in programming, before looking at some traditional performance-related knowledge, and we'll finish this chapter with the impact modern CPU architectures made in this field.

This chapter will therefore cover the following topics:

• Why performance is important: To motivate ourselves before diving into technicalities
• Traditional wisdom and basic guidelines: Old and proven performance knowledge
• Modern processor architectures: At least the performance-relevant parts of it