Manhour >>>>> energy, memory or time.
If for the same job i need 100 manhours in python and 1000 manhours in C I’d indefinitely use python.
Interesting but useless report.
Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)
51–60 of 267 posts
Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)
#52Not sure how serious they think this is, and how much is this rather a joke. If it's not a joke, they clearly not see the big picture. For example if you can write a software in a higher level language in a fraction of the time which will spare energy somewhere else in the world, it will use less electricity overall.
It depends. If you're writing a math kernel that will be deployed to a billion IoT devices each with a lifetime of 10 years, you may want to spend some more developer time to shave a few cycles in assembly language. If you're writing some single-use script to automate a single job, do it in the easiest high level language with the library support that you need.
For battery powered devices, I suppose, but for plugged in applicants No.
Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)
#53Assembly language is the lower bound here. This is a 100% correct fact that nothing can use less energy than assembly language. No such statement can be made about other languages.
Not necessarily. Sometimes compilers give better programs than a programmer can with optimization and stuff.
Right but if I write a program that converts code into assembly and does the optimizations automatically then I can get something better or equal to a compiler.
Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily. Sometimes compilers give better programs than a programmer can with optimization and stuff.
Right but if I write a program that converts code into assembly and does the optimizations automatically then I can get something better or equal to a compiler.
Isn't that exactly a compiler?
Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)
#55Interesting results, but I think the farther you go down the list the more the fact that you're using the Computer Language Benchmark Game affects what you're seeing, as not all languages get the same attention. For example, Javascript and Typescript. Theoretically, I would assume those to be very close, since one compiles to the other. And for memory usage, they are very close. But for running time, Typescript is an…
I'd be very interested in seeing a few energy benchmarks not here, for example: energy to route 1B hits to a web endpoint, energy to parse a Json, energy to grab an auth token from a web request and forward to an auth server. Energy to forward 1M 1k files from the filesystem to the network, etc.
Well, I think the reason they don't do that, and focused on the benchmark game (which I think is a good solution to their problem of needing representative sample, it just comes with its own caveats), is because much of that is often handled by libraries (possible written in C), code in the Interpreter or VM (also possibly written in C), or handled by the OS (in the case of connection handling and file access). Those are useful things to know, but don't inherently speak to the features of the language itself.
Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can write literally any JavaScript program with TypeScript (falling back to the `any` type if you really need to), so this doesn't really work in this case. Also, typical TypeScript programs are faster than typical JavaScript programs, because JavaScript JITs like predictable object shapes and monomorphic functions for the same reasons that other language implementations require them. Libraries like lodash and bl…
>typical TypeScript programs are faster than typical JavaScript programs Person who works on js engines here :) You would think this is the case, but in actuality, js and ts are about on par in performance (assuming similarly written code). This is in fact due to the fact engines optimize for idiomatic js patterns, not idiomatic typescript patterns. often these will align, but in some cases (usually revolving around…
Any articles/resources on writing high-performance JS that you would recommend? I don't use JS for work, but just for random fun stuff. So just curious to learn more about it.
Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)
#57Not sure how serious they think this is, and how much is this rather a joke. If it's not a joke, they clearly not see the big picture. For example if you can write a software in a higher level language in a fraction of the time which will spare energy somewhere else in the world, it will use less electricity overall.
How does less dev time save energy “somewhere else in the world”? Google & AWS pay money to develop & acquire technologies that save energy because of their scale. The energy used in dev is scratch compared to the energy used to run programs at scale. Google, for example, has a PHP compiler that makes all PHP web pages execute in a fraction of the energy usage of running the PHP interpreter.
Not everyone works for FAANG. Energy usage doesn’t even come up at most small shops. Cloud hosting costs might, but only if they are really out of whack.
Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)
#58The heavily parralelized C in the language shootout is not how most code is written.
Rust was specifically created to use the paralell hardware resources well, and it excels at it.
Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)
#59I'm a little surprised at where Erlang features in the list. I've never used it personally, but have heard so much about it being an amazing, performant language. I wonder why it's so time/energy/memory inefficient for the algorithms used in this exercise.
Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you’re using that assumption to cast slippery-slope doubt on the whole project without knowing anything specific. No! I think this is a very useful project and analysis. I just think that some languages might have extremely optimized versions (or possibly more likely, some languages don't quite yet have that extremely optimized version that has propagated throughout the others) and that might be affecting specific…
> I did not know if my concern was correct, and wondered if it was, what else it might affect. That’s exactly what I mean by casting doubt. If the concern might not be correct, why lead into speculation about further concerns? Let’s find out what the actual reason that TypeScript is measured slower, rather than guess as what else could be wrong if unverified theoretical assumptions might be correct.
You can look at their detailed data and sources here
https://sites.google.com/view/energy-efficiency-languages/ho...
Many benchmarks have no TS implementations, TS/JS results are about the same except for fannkuch-redux which is about a zillion times slower in the TS implementation. When looking at that kind of massive discrepancy in similar languages with the same runtime, the guess kbenson made was a perfectly sensible one. The authors of the study should have examined that kind of crazy outlier more closely and it's, as pointed out, not that unusual when using the benchmark game as a starting point.