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Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)

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Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)

#111

Post by favorited »

mises wrote: post #99
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…

> Swift That's a pretty cool idea. I read something on HN the other day about using swift in the back end, but haven't used it myself. Hopefully Apple gets support for non-ubuntu linuxes as well as windows out the door (especially since they're no longer making their own hardware). I've heard anecdotally that it has very slow compile times, so that might be another issue. > Swift is unique in the server world in that…

While I'm also bullish WRT Swift-on-the-server, reference counting has absolutely been done in server-side languages before. At least Python and PHP use reference counting, though they both also have runtime cycle breakers.

Those examples are both interpreted languages, and they have a higher runtime cost for memory management because they're actively breaking reference cycles, so it's not apples-to-apples, but it's still reference counting.

Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)

#113

Post by alangpierce »

jlarocco wrote: post #75
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…

> Theoretically, I would assume those to be very close, since one compiles to the other. I don't think that's a safe assumption. The Javascript results would be a lower bound (assuming the same algorithm, etc.), but there's no telling what "extra" Javascript (and thus overhead) might be inserted by the Typescript compiler. As far as individual results go, there's no point jumping to conclusions when the results and c…

> there's no telling what "extra" Javascript (and thus overhead) might be inserted by the Typescript compiler

TypeScript doesn't do this. With only a few exceptions, the way to turn TypeScript into JavaScript is to remove the type annotations, which leaves you with JavaScript. This is an important design goal of TypeScript: it doesn't change your code, it's just JavaScript with types. Like Babel, TypeScript can be used to compile to earlier JS versions like ES5, but I'd consider that a misconfiguration in an environment like this.

Saying that TypeScript is slower than JavaScript is almost as silly as saying "C++ with comments is slower than C++ without comments". If you see a C++ program with comments that's slower than another one without comments, it's almost certainly because they're different programs, not because the comments have any effect. From a glance through your links, it seems likely that all of the running time differences are just because it's different code being run.

Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)

#114

Post by deepnotderp »

mehrdadn wrote: post #24
dahart wrote: post #23

> A faster language is not always the most energy efficient My rule of thumb now is that memory access, not compute, is the primary consumer of energy. That would tend to confirm the above statement while also supporting the data that scripting languages aren’t super energy efficient, since they tend to do a lot more dynamic allocation than compiled languages, when generally broadly speaking about common programming…

"Costs more" in terms of energy per... what quantity exactly? Instruction executed? Clock cycle? Datum processed?

Energy per operation and delay per operation, on the order of ~40-100X more than compute...

Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)

#115

Post by hopler »

hermitdev wrote: post #87
dahart wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why is the TypeScript bench slower?

My best guess: probably written by someone that doeant know how to write performance TS. I say this with no skin in the game. I write neither JS nor TS. What I have observed in language benchmarks over the years, is that the benchmarks are rarely written by an expert, but usually by someone with cursory knowledge of the language. E.g. just enough to be dangerous. Often times, these sorts of benchmarks are done with p…

I thought the benchmark game is set up so every language's advocates can tune their language's programs. The only chance at a fair comparison is if every language gets the best implementation it can find for the challenges. There's nothing else that approaches fair comparison of apples and oranges.

Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)

#116

Post by bilbo0s »

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…

Two completely serious questions here,

1 - Why would you want to replace java on the server? (Seems obvious that it provides the best balance of productivity and performance per watt.)

2 - Assuming a company would want to replace jave, why, on earth, would we not use C++? (Or, perhaps, rust if we want to use a newcomer?) Why are we better off going all the way down this list to go and swift?

Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)

#117

Post by phlakaton »

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.

Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)

#118

Post by alangpierce »

oblib wrote: post #64

The big surprise for me is where Perl stands in the rankings, below Javascript in all three tests.

JavaScript usually runs quite a bit faster than other dynamic languages (after JIT warmup), not because it's fundamentally any faster, just because modern JS engines are so good. Browser competition has meant that the amount of engineering work put into JS performance is much, much more than just about any other language.

Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)

#119

Post by arduanika »

Can't run Rust without powering the HN servers, to host the screeds of its acolytes.

I jest, (and I'm a Rust admirer myself), but my more serious point is: so many different kinds of electricity go into a plush tech company with its well paid developers and our copious brain food that powers us through all our developing and debugging. If you want to talk about sustainability, ask about the lifecycle maintenance of a software base. These benchmarks are cute, but academic, and only tenuously related to any green solutions. Especially if people in this thread are taking this seriously in terms of "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", then this is an feels like an awful, awful way to measure it.

What language is most conducive to writing algorithms that are smart in terms of Big O, or designing systems that can be refactored intelligently instead of throwing boxes at the problem?

Re: Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)

#120

Post by abalone »

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.

> In a startup... few here will defend the choice of C...

Not sure what you're responding to but I specifically said "at scale" and "developer productivity / friendliness is important to overall success."

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