8.5 Concluding Thoughts

In this chapter, we've discussed techniques for developing fast code, analyzing algorithms, timing the runtime of our applications, using code profiling to find hot spots in our source code, and extracting the most from our compilers. In short, it's been a whirlwind introduction to the expansive field of code tuning. If you're interested in learning more, one excellent reference for optimizing applications is the book Techniques for Optimizing Applications: High Performance Computing by Rajat Garg and Ilya Sharapov (Prentice Hall).

If you only take away one piece of information or advice from this entire chapter, let it be this: write refactored code and take the time to implement fast algorithms. That sentence expresses the heart of application tuning.