Libraries and compilers used in this book
As mentioned earlier, C++ does not provide more than the bare necessities in terms of libraries. In this book, we will, therefore, have to rely on external libraries where necessary. The most commonly used library in the world of C++ is probably the Boost library (http://www.boost.org).
Some parts of this book use the Boost library where the standard C++ library is not enough. We will only use the header-only parts of the Boost library, which means that using them yourself does not require any specific build setup; rather, you just have to include the specified header file.
In addition, we will use Google Benchmark, a microbenchmark support library, to evaluate the performance of small code snippets. Google Benchmark will be introduced in Chapter 3, Analyzing and Measuring Performance.
The repository available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Cpp-High-Performance-Second-Edition with the accompanying source code of the book uses the Google Test framework to make it easier for you to build, run, and test the code.
It should also be mentioned that this book uses a lot of new features from C++20. At the time of writing, some of these features are not fully implemented by the compilers we use (Clang, GCC, and Microsoft Visual C++). Some of the features presented are completely missing or are only supported experimentally. An excellent up-to-date summary of the current status of the major C++ compilers can be found at https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support.
