David Cassel is author of this older but interesting article about university research into energy usage data by various programming languages. Can energy usage data tell us anything about the quality of our programming languages? Six researchers in Portugal from three different universities decided to investigate this question, ultimately releasing a paper titled “Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages.”
A faster language is not always the most energy efficient.
Specifically, they used 10 problems from the Computer Language Benchmarks Game, a free software project for comparing performance which includes a standard set of simple algorithmic problems, as well as a framework for running tests.
Power consumption was measured using a tool from Intel — the Running Average Power Limit tool. The paper took a hard look at the common assumption that a faster program will always use less energy.
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