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.
The main focus of REF was the methodology and the comparison of the CPU-based energy efficiency in 10 of the 28 languages.
Towards a Green Ranking for Programming Languages
SBLP 2017
Computer Science