This book offers insights into C++, including the algorithms and practices used in game development, and explores the language's strengths and weaknesses, its established workflows, and hands-on solutions, because C++ still dominates the game industry today thanks to its combination of high performance, flexibility, and deep low-level control.

Hotspots and bottlenecks

The key task in optimization is to find hotspots, which are code fragments with a high computational load, and bottlenecks, which are components that limit overall throughput, and these problems usually fall into three categories, namely abstractions, smoothness, and hardware limitations.

Abstractions, or more precisely premature abstractions, add unnecessary layers to the engine architecture and make the whole system more complex than it needs to be, and the usual suspects here are multiple inheritance, one-size-fits-all solutions to game development problems, and heavy use of design patterns in places where simple procedural code would do…