Coding Practices which enable the compiler/optimizer to make a faster program

Question

Many years ago, C compilers were not particularly smart. As a workaround K&R invented the register keyword, to hint to the compiler, that maybe it woul

Answer 1

One optimization i have used in C++ is creating a constructor that does nothing. One must manually call an init() in order to put the object into a working state.

This has benefit in the case where I need a large vector of these classes.

I call reserve() to allocate the space for the vector, but the constructor does not actually touch the page of memory the object is on. So I have spent some address space, but not actually consumed a lot of physical memory. I avoid the page faults associated the associated construction costs.

As i generate objects to fill the vector, I set them using init(). This limits my total page faults, and avoids the need to resize() the vector while filling it.