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CppCon 2017: Matt Godbolt “What Has My Compiler Done for Me Lately? Unbolting the Compiler's Lid”

CppCon · 178K views · 2017-10-02 · 1:15:46

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Overview

Matt Godbolt's CppCon 2017 talk shows what modern compilers do with your C++ code, using Compiler Explorer to inspect generated assembly. It covers surprising optimizations and how the tool works.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as an entertaining, mind-blowing look at compiler cleverness from a great speaker.

Recommended by 7 HN people across 6 months · HN mentions 2018–2022

Topics

Compilers, interpreters & program analysisC, C++, Rust, Go & systems languagesTesting, debugging & developer tools
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compiler explorerc++assemblygodboltcppcon

What people said

snailmailman · 2019-09 · Strong recommendation

I highly recommend Matt Godbolt's talk "What has my compiler done for me lately?"[0] and its follow-up[1]. Both are great presentations going into details on some of the crazy optimizations compilers will do. As someone who knows very little about the inner workings of compilers my mind was blown when I saw some them. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]

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drej · 2018-12 · Strong recommendation

Matt Godbolt is a great speaker as well. I loved this talk that included a bit about the architecture behind his Compiler Explorer. The rest of his talk is super cool as well. E.g. closed form solutions from O(n) code? Compilers are awesome. [VIDEO]

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s3cur3 · 2021-03 · Recommendation

Link to the (great) CppCon talk: [VIDEO] The one thing I would say is: as you dig more into C++ perf, you can develop an intuition for the kinds of things the compiler can and can't optimize. For instance, the C++ example from the article uses `std::unordered_map`, which is just an absolute mess from a cache locality perspective—the best compilers today (or of the foreseeable future) can't do a thing to fix that. Improving the programmer's choice of data structure is just not on the radar. :(

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Sources

Video by CppCon, played through YouTube.

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