Towards a Green Ranking for Programming Languages

Abstract

While in the past the primary goal to optimize software was the run time optimization, nowadays there is a growing awareness of the need to reduce energy consumption. Additionally, a growing number of developers wish to become more energy-aware when programming and feel a lack of tools and the knowledge to do so. In this paper we define a ranking of energy efficiency in programming languages. We consider a set of computing problems implemented in ten well-known programming languages, and monitored the energy consumed when executing each language. Our preliminary results show that although the fastest languages tend to be the lowest consuming ones, there are other interesting cases where slower languages are more energy efficient than faster ones. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software performance; General programming languages;

Energy efficiency across programming languages: how do energy, time, and memory relate?

“…The work presented in this paper extends the work presented by [6], where the energy consumption monitoring approach for different programming languages was introduced. The main focus of [6] was the methodology and the comparison of the CPU-based energy efficiency in 10 of the 28 languages.…”

“…The work presented in this paper extends the work presented by [6], where the energy consumption monitoring approach for different programming languages was introduced. The main focus of [6] was the methodology and the comparison of the CPU-based energy efficiency in 10 of the 28 languages. We made a wider and more in-depth analysis, since in addition to including all languages, we also included the DRAM-based energy consumption and peak memory usage values, and presented a discussion on how energy, time and energy relate in software, and on different languages divided by type and paradigm.…”

“…The overall motivation is to be able to compare solutions, within and between, different programming languages. While the perspectives for comparing solutions have originally essentially analyzed runtime performance, the fact is that CLBG has recently also been used in order to study the energy efficiency of software [6,21,25].…”

“…This work builds on previous work [6] which presents a framework to allow the monitoring of the energy consumption of executable software programs. In that work, the C-based framework was used to define a preliminary ranking of ten languages (where only energy was considered).…”

GreenSource: A Large-Scale Collection of Android Code, Tests and Energy Metrics

“…To address the developers demands, researchers started developing tools and techniques to analyze the energy efficiency of software components, such as data structures [3]- [6], APIs [7], [8], source code patterns [9]- [12] and even languages [13], [14]. Nevertheless, the validation of such tools and techniques is not always performed over a large collection of software artifacts, hence theirs conclusions cannot be completely generalized.…”