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Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages

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Re: Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages

#21

Post by aaron-lebo »

flavio81 wrote: post #2

According to their normalized "global" results, something interesting i see: 1. Pascal, surprisingly, the most memory efficient of all. I should take a look at the implementation they used. 2. Rust a good alternative to C which leads in "energy efficiency" and speed. 3. Common Lisp most energy-efficient and fastest and smallest memory footprint of all the dynamic programming languages in the list -- like Python, Ruby…

Where are you getting that Pascal is the most memory efficient (edit: duh, under the "memory efficiency" table, mistakingly read this as "efficient")? It's firmly in the middle of the pack in every result, in their global result table it's slower and less energy efficient than Java (!). It's only advantage is that it's smaller than anything else.

Don't mean to assume you are wrong, but what are you referring to?

Re: Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages

#22

Post by copx »

flavio81 wrote: post #2

According to their normalized "global" results, something interesting i see: 1. Pascal, surprisingly, the most memory efficient of all. I should take a look at the implementation they used. 2. Rust a good alternative to C which leads in "energy efficiency" and speed. 3. Common Lisp most energy-efficient and fastest and smallest memory footprint of all the dynamic programming languages in the list -- like Python, Ruby…

>5. I wonder which implementation of Lua they used. Lua can be pretty fast, one of the fastest dynamic languages out there.

I looked at the binary trees benchmark and while the Python version used multiprocessing to parallelize the code, the Lua version was not parallelized at all..

.. not that this is entirely unrealistic. Python comes with MP in the standard library while I am not aware of any "industrial strength" solution for Lua, whether MP or thread-based.

Re: Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages

#23

Post by trhway »

For a bunch of years i was writing in Java and driving V8. Now i'm back to native (C++) and am driving Prius these days. I guess that it is my eco-consciousness that is making me shudder in disgust every time i look at Python... pretty much the same way like when looking at Hummers. While of course i love Perl, an M1 Abrams which gets things done despite anything :)

Re: Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages

#24

Post by bbatha »

brlewis wrote: post #19
stewbrew wrote: post #15

So go (a garbage collected language) is about as memory efficient as pascal, the most memory efficient language. That comes surprising.

Not really. "Manual" memory allocation is usually malloc/free, which leaves a lot of gaps.

Go's garbage collector isn't compacting.

Re: Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages

#25

Post by oconnor663 »

igouy wrote: post #20
cwzwarich wrote: post #11

I can't believe they used the Computer Language Benchmarks Game. Those benchmarks don't reflect real-world workloads at all, and the contest has fairly arbitrary rules about implementations and widely differing implementation quality between languages. This should have been rejected by peer review.

> Those benchmarks don't reflect real-world workloads at all… That's a very definite claim, for which you provide no supporting evidence ;-)

Maybe we could get away with a couple smaller claims:

- It would be weird to expect programs specifically optimized for a performance benchmark, to also be optimal for energy usage or memory. Maybe less weird for energy, if runtime is the biggest factor in how much energy gets used. But I'd expect there to be huge tradeoffs between runtime and memory usage, once we start really optimizing for memory.

- Running the Benchmarks Game has meant doing a lot of work to figure out what the relationship between "optimal" and "representative" is, and what the rules of the game should be as a result. Even if we take it for granted that we've answered those questions in a way that gives us useful benchmarks for performance, it would be weird to expect the answers to be exactly the same in benchmarks for energy or memory.

Re: Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages

#26

Post by kerpele »

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #12

Why is TypeScript so much less efficient than JavaScript?

It seems to only be significantly different with fannkuch-redux. Looking at the CLBG page (http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/performance.php?...) for that algorithm there doesn't seem to be very big difference at all.

I cannot explain the difference and if this is indeed an error by the authors of the paper it casts a fairly big shadow on the reliability of the rest of the data.

Re: Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages

#28

Post by shock »

flavio81 wrote: post #2

According to their normalized "global" results, something interesting i see: 1. Pascal, surprisingly, the most memory efficient of all. I should take a look at the implementation they used. 2. Rust a good alternative to C which leads in "energy efficiency" and speed. 3. Common Lisp most energy-efficient and fastest and smallest memory footprint of all the dynamic programming languages in the list -- like Python, Ruby…

> 5. I wonder which implementation of Lua they used.

There is a table with the versions they used¹, but they don't mention the implementation – in can be inferred for some: e.g. for Pascal they used the Free Pascal Compiler.

① - https://sites.google.com/view/energy-efficiency-languages/se...

Re: Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages

#29

Post by shock »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #21
flavio81 wrote: post #2

According to their normalized "global" results, something interesting i see: 1. Pascal, surprisingly, the most memory efficient of all. I should take a look at the implementation they used. 2. Rust a good alternative to C which leads in "energy efficiency" and speed. 3. Common Lisp most energy-efficient and fastest and smallest memory footprint of all the dynamic programming languages in the list -- like Python, Ruby…

Where are you getting that Pascal is the most memory efficient (edit: duh, under the "memory efficiency" table, mistakingly read this as "efficient")? It's firmly in the middle of the pack in every result, in their global result table it's slower and less energy efficient than Java (!). It's only advantage is that it's smaller than anything else. Don't mean to assume you are wrong, but what are you referring to?

In the `Normalized Global Results` table, Pascal is used as the reference (for memory use) and everything else is reported relative to it.
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