Analyzing Programming Languages’ Energy Consumption: An Empirical Study Stefanos Georgiou Maria Kechagia Diomidis Spinellis Athens University of Economics and Delft University of Technology Athens University of Economics and Business Delft, The Netherlands Business Athens, Greece
[email protected] Athens, Greece
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT increase of energy consumption.1 Recent research conducted by Motivation: Shifting from traditional local servers towards cloud Gelenbe and Caseau [7] and Van Heddeghem et al. [14] indicates a computing and data centers—where different applications are facil- rising trend of the it sector energy requirements. It is expected to itated, implemented, and communicate in different programming reach 15% of the world’s total energy consumption by 2020. languages—implies new challenges in terms of energy usage. Most of the studies, for energy efficiency, have considered energy Goal: In this preliminary study, we aim to identify energy implica- consumption at hardware level. However, there is much of evidence tions of small, independent tasks developed in different program- that software can also alter energy dissipation significantly [2, 5, 6]. 2 3 ming languages; compiled, semi-compiled, and interpreted ones. Therefore, many conference tracks (e.g. greens, eEnergy) have Method: To achieve our purpose, we collected, refined, compared, recognized the energy–efficiency at the software level as an emerg- and analyzed a number of implemented tasks from Rosetta Code, ing research challenge regarding the implementation of modern that is a publicly available Repository for programming chrestomathy. systems. Results: Our analysis shows that among compiled programming Nowadays, more companies are shifting from traditional local languages such as C, C++, Java, and Go offers the highest energy servers and mainframes towards the data centers.