Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)

Post by maweki » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 8:29 AM UTC

phlakaton wrote: post #117

abalone wrote: post #91

Couple points (I've worked on app servers): 1- This is exactly how we should all be thinking about server engineering moving forward, as we aim to drastically reduce carbon footprint within 11 years. Efficiencies at the language level are one of biggest bangs for buck here. Just by redeploying, you can reduce energy consumption by perhaps double digits. Imagine how hard that is to do at the hardware or energy farm le…

I don't think carbon footprint is the be-all end-all you suggest. In a startup that has yet to scale, trading off efficiency for, say, flexibility, safety, or expressiveness may have minimal carbon impact but major benefit for your business. After all, few here will defend the choice of C for web service development these days.

Post by vanderZwan » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 8:55 AM UTC

speedplane wrote: post #172

Historically, virtually every move up the abstraction level sacrificed performance to gain programming efficiency. Assembly to C, C to C++, C++ to Java, Java to Python/Javascript. And now there are wars over Javascript vs. Typescript, and jQuery vs. React/Angular. Every new step up the stack claims that the higher level of abstraction can either be implemented with only a minimal penalty, or could actually improve pe…

Post by CapsAdmin » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 9:07 AM UTC

speedplane wrote: post #172

Historically, virtually every move up the abstraction level sacrificed performance to gain programming efficiency. Assembly to C, C to C++, C++ to Java, Java to Python/Javascript. And now there are wars over Javascript vs. Typescript, and jQuery vs. React/Angular. Every new step up the stack claims that the higher level of abstraction can either be implemented with only a minimal penalty, or could actually improve pe…

Post by rienbdj » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 9:18 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #139

kbenson wrote: post #4

Interesting 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…

as not all languages get the same attention. ...which also seems to be reflective of how much programmers using language X care about (execution) efficiency, so I'd say these results are not far off from reality. C and C++ are another interesting pair --- proponents of the latter always love to claim "zero cost abstractions" that allow you to write very abstract code which they say the compiler can then optimise (or…

Post by rienbdj » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 9:41 AM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #55

dnautics wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…