CppCon 2015

Complex numbers are an important tool from mathematics enabling many problems to be written in a more generic form. The C++ standard library comes with an implementation to work with complex numbers in a natural way.

Motivated by useful real world examples from theoretical physics and audio dsp I will discuss benchmarks of std::complex and demonstrate how alternative implementations, naïve or advanced ones based on expression templates, outperform std::complex and can compete with hand-crafted C code (depending on compiler and std lib). A quick introduction to expression templates will be provided.