Optimizing by executing less code

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The most straightforward approach to optimizing is by executing less code. This approach usually gives a fixed speed-up without changing the time complexity of the code.

Even though this approach gives you a clear speedup, this will only give noticable improvements when the code is called a lot.

Removing useless code

void func(const A *a); // Some random function

// useless memory allocation + deallocation for the instance
auto a1 = std::make_unique<A>();
func(a1.get()); 

// making use of a stack object prevents 
auto a2 = A{};
func(&a2);

From C++14, compilers are allowed to optimize this code to remove the allocation and matching deallocation.

Doing code only once

std::map<std::string, std::unique_ptr<A>> lookup;
// Slow insertion/lookup
// Within this function, we will traverse twice through the map lookup an element
// and even a thirth time when it wasn't in
const A *lazyLookupSlow(const std::string &key) {
    if (lookup.find(key) != lookup.cend())
        lookup.emplace_back(key, std::make_unique<A>());
    return lookup[key].get();
}

// Within this function, we will have the same noticeable effect as the slow variant while going at double speed as we only traverse once through the code
const A *lazyLookupSlow(const std::string &key) {
    auto &value = lookup[key];
    if (!value)
        value = std::make_unique<A>();
    return value.get();
}

A similar approach to this optimization can be used to implement a stable version of unique

std::vector<std::string> stableUnique(const std::vector<std::string> &v) {
    std::vector<std::string> result;
    std::set<std::string> checkUnique;
    for (const auto &s : v) {
        // As insert returns if the insertion was successful, we can deduce if the element was already in or not
        // This prevents an insertion, which will traverse through the map for every unique element
        // As a result we can almost gain 50% if v would not contain any duplicates
        if (checkUnique.insert(s).second)
            result.push_back(s);
    }
    return result;
}

Preventing useless reallocating and copying/moving

In the previous example, we already prevented lookups in the std::set, however the std::vector still contains a growing algorithm, in which it will have to realloc its storage. This can be prevented by first reserving for the right size.

std::vector<std::string> stableUnique(const std::vector<std::string> &v) {
    std::vector<std::string> result;
    // By reserving 'result', we can ensure that no copying or moving will be done in the vector
    // as it will have capacity for the maximum number of elements we will be inserting
    // If we make the assumption that no allocation occurs for size zero
    // and allocating a large block of memory takes the same time as a small block of memory
    // this will never slow down the program
    // Side note: Compilers can even predict this and remove the checks the growing from the generated code
    result.reserve(v.size());
    std::set<std::string> checkUnique;
    for (const auto &s : v) {
        // See example above
        if (checkUnique.insert(s).second)
            result.push_back(s);
    }
    return result;
}

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