What this book covers

Chapter 1, Understanding Performant Programs, introduces you to the world of performance, discusses modern processor architectures, and recounts some traditional performance wisdom.

Chapter 2, Profiling to Find Bottlenecks, looks at the tooling we use to diagnose performance problems, concentrating specifically on the tools available on Windows.

Chapter 3, Deep Dive into C++ and Performance, takes a closer look at the C++ 11 language, its general performance, the performance of its numerous features, and the role of compilers and linkers in the performance game.

Chapter 4, Using Data Structures and Algorithms Efficiently, discusses the performance impact of data structures and algorithms and then takes a closer look at the data structures used by Qt in its API and the associated performance gotchas.

Chapter 5, An In-Depth Guide to Concurrency and Multithreading, describes multithreading concepts, Qt multithreading classes and techniques, explains the multithreading is hard mantra, and offers some techniques for minimizing multithreading costs and pitfalls.

Chapter 6, Performance Fails and How to Overcome Them, looks back at some performance challenges I encountered during my work.

Chapter 7, Understanding I/O Performance and Overcoming Related Problems, turns our attention to the unglamorous theme of reading, writing, and parsing files, as well as unexpected interactions with a number of OS mechanisms.

Chapter 8, Optimizing Graphical Performance, looks at the main usage scenario of Qt—writing graphical UIs. We will learn about GPUs, and their performance and usage in Qt. Later, we will have a look at the main classes of Qt Widgets and Qt Quick and will discuss what their performance depends upon.

Chapter 9, Optimizing Network Performance, introduces basic networking concepts, the TCP and HTTP protocols, the Qt classes supporting them, and the network optimization techniques available in Qt.

Chapter 10, Qt Performance on Embedded and Mobile Platforms, looks at mobile and embedded usage of Qt. It builds on the knowledge we acquired in the previous chapters to examine the specific performance challenges faced by Qt on those platforms.

Chapter 11, Testing and Deploying Qt Applications, ends this book with a discussion of testing and deployment tools and techniques.