Manual and Fast C Code Optimization

TL;DR

This paper discusses manual C code optimization techniques, emphasizing programmer experience and profiling tools like Intel VTune, demonstrated through case studies on Heap Sort and Factorial functions.

Contribution

It provides practical guidelines for manual optimization in C and showcases an implementation using Intel VTune with real-world case studies.

Findings

Manual optimization can significantly improve performance.

Profiling tools aid in identifying optimization opportunities.

Case studies demonstrate effective optimization strategies.

Abstract

Developing an application with high performance through the code optimization places a greater responsibility on the programmers. While most of the existing compilers attempt to automatically optimize the program code, manual techniques remain the predominant method for performing optimization. Deciding where to try to optimize code is difficult, especially for large complex applications. For manual optimization, the programmers can use his experiences in writing the code, and then he can use a software profiler in order to collect and analyze the performance data from the code. In this work, we have gathered the most experiences which can be applied to improve the style of writing programs in C language as well as we present an implementation of the manual optimization of the codes using the Intel VTune profiler. The paper includes two case studies to illustrate our optimization on the Heap Sort and Factorial functions.