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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)

#91

Post by abalone »

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 level.

Think about it: You, brave software engineer, can literally make a significant contribution to saving the world by adopting a more energy-efficient language, if you are fortunate enough to deploy something at scale.

2- Rust is killing it in these metrics but developer productivity / friendliness is important to overall success. Looking at these results I have a conjecture that is maybe provocative: The top two candidates for long-term success at supplanting Java on the server in my eyes are

a) Go

b) brace yourself.. Swift

Swift is extremely young on the server, to the point where I'd expect your natural reaction to be "WTFLOL?! never heard of it". But here's some food for thought: the Netty team, one of the top performing Java server stacks, has been recruited by Apple and is chewing through all that stuff and just launched their NIO2 release[1] which I've heard is already very close to Netty.

Go has an amazing concurrent garbage collector and has really pushed the envelope with that.[2] Swift is unique in the server world in that it uses reference counting which sidesteps the whole GC collection problem, which could translate into very low, very consistent latencies as well as memory usage. It's still quite early days for Swift, but these are the two languages I'm watching the closest.

[1] https://forums.swift.org/c/server

[2] https://blog.golang.org/ismmkeynote

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

#92

Post by 4thaccount »

osrec wrote: post #59

I'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.

It's built for massively distributed systems and is efficient at that I believe. It's not really designed to be a replacement for numeric languages like C/C++/Fortran/Ada...etc. It's a high level language, so what you gain in user development efficiency, you lose in performance. Someone knowledgeable in Erlang could confirm though as I'm being general.

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

#93

Post by 4thaccount »

mftrhu wrote: post #9
mtreis86 wrote: post #2

Which lisp? Those numbers don't seem right from my experience with SBCL.

The data for the paper the article talks about is online [1], and it says [2] that the benchmarks are "implemented in 28 different languages (exactly as taken from the Computer Language Benchmark Game)". The LISP evaluated by the Benchmark Game - and, apparently, this paper - is indeed SBCL [3], which seems about on par with Java. “Lisp, on average, consumes 2.27x more energy (131.34J) than C, while taking 2.44x more…

I think this is what is so cool about Common Lisp. You can literally get pretty darn close to C in performance and still be at the highest levels of development efficiency/prototyping speed. I don't think too many other languages can say so. Take Python. It has really fast development time, but very slow performance.

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

#94

Post by hermitdev »

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?

I think practically, for useful analysis in business it would be wattage per unit of useful work (or datum processed as you suggest). For instance, I work in finance, so what is the wattage per option price calculation?

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

#96

Post by bhauer »

Very interesting!

We have wanted to do a similar conversion from the results data in our TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks [1] to energy efficiency. I've wanted to go as far as converting watt-hours to some average carbon emission rate for electricity generation in a given region.

I imagine the carbon emission per request would be amusing, if nothing else.

[1] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

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

#97

Post by jandrese »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #43
snek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe they included compilation? it would make sense as that's a real world use of cpu/memory/energy.

But it certainly looks like they didn't include compilation time for all of the compiled-to-machine-code languages. C has the reference value of '1'.

I think they included compile time if the code is JITed at startup.

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

#98

Post by mehrdadn »

hermitdev wrote: post #94
mehrdadn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think practically, for useful analysis in business it would be wattage per unit of useful work (or datum processed as you suggest). For instance, I work in finance, so what is the wattage per option price calculation?

The reason I asked was that it wasn't clear to me if the parent comment was measuring the same way or not re: memory accesses. It seemed pretty expected that a memory access would be more expensive per byte (it takes like hundreds of clock cycles...) but it wasn't obvious to me if it would be so per clock so I wanted to clarify which was meant.

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

#99

Post by mises »

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 it uses reference counting

Out of curiosity, why has no-one done automatic reference counting on the server side before? C++11 has smart pointers, and I believe python does as well (can't speak to this one personally).

I also feel like most languages using the llvm backend could achieve performance at least close to c++; wasn't that part of the purpose? It seems like Swift might be especially ripe for this because Apple is the big developer of both LLVM and Swift.

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

#100

Post by jandrese »

voldacar wrote: post #3

C and Haskell were about what I expected, but those Pascal results have me scratching my head, given that it performed about as well as C and used even less RAM.

Pascal and C are roughly equivalent in my eyes, at least as far as what they spit out in the end. Both have pretty similar feature sets and development methodologies.

What surprised me is how much of a hit the OO programs took. I had thought they would compile down to something reasonably similar to the imperative languages, but C++ ended up being 50% slower.

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