About the Authors

As the authors of the book you are about to read, we would like to introduce ourselves. With more than 10 years of professional IT experience between us, we have worked on vastly different projects for different companies. One of us is currently involved in designing time-critical embedded software, the other is working on Internet and satellite-transmission software for digital video communications.

In our spare time we have been working on a project which involved developing advanced techniques for optimizing C/C++ code for speed and size. We found that while working on professional software, the same kinds of problems and pitfalls kept arising, whether during development of embedded software or even desktop applications. It seemed to us that a deeper understanding of these problems could not only aid in writing better software, but also be of great assistance during fault solving. That is why we decided that the result of our project should be a tutorial in which we share our findings of practical problems and the solutions we used, as well as our theories on optimizing software.

The book you are holding now is in fact one that we, and many of our colleagues, have been looking for since we started in the IT business.

R. Alexander

G. Bensley