Energy-Efficient Programming Languages: Results from a Cross-Language Study
A recent paper examines the energy consumption, runtime, and memory usage of software across 27 programming languages, revealing that compiled languages like C and C++ are the most energy‑efficient, while highlighting the growing importance of energy awareness in software development and its implications for embedded, mobile, and cryptocurrency applications.
Most people (including professional software developers) often overlook the energy consumption and efficiency of software solutions.
A recent paper titled “Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages” discusses the need to consider runtime, memory usage, and pure energy consumption when developing software.
The paper aligns with contemporary concerns about climate change and the demand for more clean energy.
Relevant GitHub repository: https://github.com/greensoftwarelab/Energy-Languages
Results page: https://sites.google.com/view/energy-efficiency-languages
Software development history shows early constraints such as memory; for example, the Apollo 11 guidance computer in 1969 had only 4 KB of memory and 32 KB of storage.
Technological improvements and better utilization of existing technology have enabled growth, but speed remains a primary issue today.
Modern hardware contains billions to trillions of transistors, and performance is often equated with speed, while other factors like energy consumption are frequently ignored.
Energy consumption is becoming a primary concern, especially for embedded systems and mobile applications, and cryptocurrency mining profitability also heavily depends on energy usage.
Battery technology still lags behind current demand.
The researchers benchmarked 27 programming languages using a computer language benchmark suite.
Results show that compiled languages are the fastest and most energy‑efficient.
C and C++ proved to be the most energy‑saving, while Go performed less efficiently.
The tests were conducted on a machine with an Intel Core i5‑4460 Haswell CPU @ 3.20 GHz, 16 GB RAM, running Ubuntu Server 16.10 and Linux 4.8.0‑22.
C, C++, Rust, and Java were the most efficient languages, although Java consumes a lot of memory. Faster execution does not necessarily mean lower energy usage.
References: Pereira, R., Couto, M., Ribeiro, F., Rua, R., Cunha, J., Fernandes, J.P., and Saraiva, J. (2017). Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages: How Energy, Time, and Memory Relate? Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE 2017). OSNOVE RAČUNARSKIH ARHITEKTURA and Prof. Novica Nosović et al.
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