Introduction

Hi, my name is Jim Hogg and I am a Program Manager, working in the Visual C++ compiler team in Microsoft, based on the main campus here in Redmond. More specifically, I work in the part of the compiler that optimizes your code, to make it run faster, or to make it smaller, or a mixture of the two.

In this series of blog posts, I will explain some of the optimizations that make your code run faster. I'll include examples, with measurements of how much gain various optimizations might deliver. I'll then describe some of the more recent optimizations that the team has added, transforming your code in amazing, non-obvious ways.

Who is this blog aimed at? Anyone that is interested in how compilers work. Anyone that wonders how a compiler can possibly make the code you wrote run faster than "what the original C++ code says". And, on the opposite side, some of the patterns that prevent or inhibit optimization: armed with this knowledge, you might tweak your source code to allow the optimizer more freedom, and make your program run faster.

What are the pre-requisites to follow along with this blog? Some knowledge of programming in C or C++. (Most of the examples I will use can be understood in C. Only towards the end will I examine optimizations that are specific to C++ code – such as "de-virtualization"). Ideally, you should be able to read 64-bit assembler code: that way, you can really see the transformations the optimizations make. But this is not a hard requirement – I'll aim to provide insights without digging all the way down to the binary machine code that the compiler generates.

I will create a Table-of-Contents here for all of the blog posts in this series, updating as I publish each post.

1. Introduction (this post)
2. Overview – the process of compiling C++ code
3. Constant-Folding
4. Dead Code Elimination
5. . . .
6. . . .
7. Function Inlining
8. . . .
9. . . .
10. Whole-Program Optimization (Link-Time Code Generation)
11. . . .