C is one of the most energy saving language
C is one of the most energy saving language
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31184706
C is one of the top languages in terms of speed, memory and energy
https://www.threads.com/@engineerscodex/post/C9_R-uhvGbv?hl=en
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For those who don't want to open threads, it's a link to a paper on energy efficiency of programming languages.
Results
For Haskell to land that low on the list tells me they either couldn't find a good Haskell programmer and/or weren't using GHC.
Also the difference between TS and JS doesn't make sense at first glance. 🤷♂️ I guess I need to read the research.
My first thought is perhaps the TS is not targeting ESNext so they're getting hit with polyfills or something
Wonder what they used for the JS state since it's dependent on the runtime.
Every time I get surprised by the efficiency of Lisp! I guess they mean Common Lisp there, not Clojure or any modern dialect.
Yeah every time I see this chart I think "unless it's performance critical, realtime, or embedded, why would I use anything else?" It's very flexible, a joy to use, amazing interactive shell(s). Paren navigation is awesome. The build/tooling is not the best, but it is manageable.
That said, OCaml is nice too.
Looking at the Energy/Time ratios (lower is better) on page 15 is also interesting, it gives an idea of how "power hungry per CPU cycle" each language might be. Python's very high
WASM would be interesting as well, because lots of stuff can be compiled to it to run on the web
Indeed, here's an example - my climate-system model web-app, written in scala running (mainly) in wasm
(note: that was compiled with scala-js 1.17, they say latest 1.19 does wasm faster, I didn't yet compare).
[ Edit: note wasm variant only works with most recent browsers, maybe with experimental options set - if not try without ?wasm ]I have no clue what I am looking at but it is absolutely mesmerizing.
Oh, it's designed for a big desktop screen, although it just happens to work on mobile devices too - their compute power is enough, but to understand the interactions of complex systems, we need space.
I would be interested in how things like MATLAB and octave compare to R and python. But I guess it doesn't matter as much because the relative time of those being run in a data analysis or research context is probably relatively low compared to production code.
Is there a lot of computation-intensive code being written in pure Python? My impression was that the numpy/pandas/polars etc kind of stuff was powered by languages like fortran, rust and c++.
The popular well crafted ones are, but not all are well crafted.
I have a hard time believing Java is that high up. I'd place it around c#.
Love the "I reject your empirical data and substitute my emotions" energy.
Why?
(A super slimmed down flavour of) Java runs on fucking simcards.
In theory Java is very similar to C#, an IL based JIT runtime with a GC, of course. So where is the difference coming from between the two? How is it better than pascal, a complied language? These are the questions I'm wondering about.
And it powers a lot of phones. People generally don't like it when their phone needs to charge all the freaking time.
I ran Linux with KDE on my phone for a while and it for sure needed EVEN MORE charging all the time even though most of the system is C, with a sprinkle of C++ and QT.
But that is probably due to other inefficiencies and lack of optimization (which is fine, make it work first, optimize later)
Yeah, and Android has had some 16 years of "optimize later". I have some very very limited experience with writing mobile apps and while I found it to be a PITA, there is clearly a lot of thought given to how to not eat all the battery and die in the ecosystem there. I would expect that kind of work to also be done at the JVM level.
If Windows Mobile had succeeded, C# likely would've been lower as well, just because there'd be more incentive to make a battery charge last longer.
C# has been very optimized since .NET Core (now .NET). Also jit compiler and everything around it.
Because usually they use the super fat flavor of Java. Jabba Fatt tier of lardiness Java.
I'm using the fattest of java (Kotlin) on the fattest of frameworks (Spring boot) and it is still decently fast on a 5 year old raspberry pi. I can hit precise 50 μs timings with it.
Imagine doing it in fat python (as opposed to micropython) like all the hip kids.
Perl is disappointing too. I always considered it as an etalon shit-script.
That definitely raised an eyebrow for me. Admittedly I haven't looked in a while but I thought I remembered perl being much more performant than ruby and python
Does the paper take into account the energy required to compile the code, the complexity of debugging and thus the required re-compilations after making small changes? Because IMHO that should all be part of the equation.
It's a good question, but I think the amount of time spent compiling a language is going to be pretty tiny compared to the amount of time the application is running.
Still - "energy efficiency" may be the worst metric to use when choosing a language.
Energy efficiency strongly correlates to datacentre costs.
And battery costs, including charging time, for a lot of devices. Users generally aren't happy with devices that run out of juice all the time.
They compile each benchmark solution as needed, following the CLBG guidelines, but they do not measure or report the energy consumed during the compilation step.
Time to write our own paper with regex and compiler flags.