C++ Lecture at TU Munich, Germany 2024

In the beginning of November, we will return to TU Munich to deliver our own C++ lecture to the computer science students. This lecture marks a new milestone in our partnership with TU Munich, where we have previously participated in the IKOM career fair and hosted our EAT++ lecture and Summer Parties.

TUM is the only technical university in Germany to continuously retain the University of Excellence status since 2006. Its Department of Computer Science is one of the largest teaching and research institutions for Informatics in the country.

In his talk, "A Deep Dive into Dispatching Techniques," Jonathan Müller, a think-cell Software Engineer, will discuss assembly, optimizations, and profiling with the students.

At the core of an interpreter is a loop that iterates over instructions and executes them in order. This requires dispatching: based on the current instruction, it needs to select different code. A fast interpreter requires a fast instruction dispatcher, but so does everything else that needs to switch over a fixed set of different options.

This talk investigates various dispatching techniques, from simple switch statements to jump tables. We'll look at performance analysis tools, benchmarks, and lots and lots of assembly code, in order to learn ways to trick the compiler into generating the assembly code that we actually want.

The students will primarily learn about efficient dispatching techniques and their relative performance, but also about profiling, benchmarks, and CPU features like instruction caches and branch predictors.

We look forward to sharing our expertise and strengthening our collaboration through this technical exchange.