Modern programs’ performance characteristics are often dictated by their data. Whether the cache locality of data access, the size of working set, or avoiding costly memory allocation overhead. Unfortunately, the standard C++ library data structures range from adequate to terrible at controlling these aspects, and they don’t provide any of the core mechanisms needed for extremely efficient data structure design.
This talk will present the core concepts of designing high performance data structures in C++. It is based on years of experience in
the LLVM compiler as well as several other large code bases. From these principles, the talk will propose a suite of data structures that provide performance without loss of generality or functionality. As much as this talk will present specific data structure designs, its primary intent will be to give an understanding of what makes these structures have greater performance than more naive approaches.
