Greenest Language

ESG has become more important and IT impacts the green of the world, therefore, as IT, we will need to consider how we can make the world greener. But let’s talk about the lowest topic, LANGUAGE.

I referred to the paper (“Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages”).

This paper presents a study of the runtime, memory usage and energy consumption of twenty seven well-known software langauges. We monitor the performance of such languages using ten different programming problems, expressed in each of the languages.

The energy consumption of a solution will then be the energy consumed by the system call, which we measured using RAPL function calls.

Is Faster, greener?

As Energy(J) = Power(W) x Time(s), this indicates that reducing time implies a reduction in the energy consumed.

Let’s see the result.

• Best efficient languages: C, C++, Rust, Fortran, Java
• Worst efficient languages: Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP
• Python spends 45 times more energy than C.
• Python spends 16 times more energy than Java.