cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31184706

C is one of the top languages in terms of speed, memory and energy

https://www.threads.com/@engineerscodex/post/C9_R-uhvGbv?hl=en

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[–] 33 points 1 year ago (53 children)

For those who don't want to open threads, it's a link to a paper on energy efficiency of programming languages.

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  • [–] 39 points 1 year ago (47 children)
  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (16 children)

    Also the difference between TS and JS doesn't make sense at first glance. 🤷‍♂️ I guess I need to read the research.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (14 children)

    It does, the "compiler" adds a bunch of extra garbage for extra safety that really does have an impact.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    I thought the idea of TS is that it strongly types everything so that the JS interpreter doesn't waste all of its time trying to figure out the best way to store a variable in RAM.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    The code is ultimately ran in a JS interpreter. AFAIK TS transpiles into JS, there's no TS specific interpreter. But such a huge difference is unexpected to me.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (7 children)

    Its really not, have you noticed how an enum is transpiled? you end up with a function... a lot of other things follow the same pattern.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Nope, have not noticed because I hate JavaScript with a passion. Thanks for educating me.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    No they don't. Enums are actually unique in being the only Typescript feature that requires code gen, and they consider that to have been a mistake.

    In any case that's not the cause of the difference here.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    This isn't true, there are other features that "emit code", that includes: namespaces, decorators and some cases even async / await (when targeting ES5 or ES6).

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Ah yeah I forgot about namespaces. I don't think they're a popular feature.

    The other two only generate code for backwards compatibility. When targeting the latest JavaScript versions they don't generate anything.

    Ok decorators are technically still only a proposal so they're slightly jumping the gun there, but the point remains.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I guess we can take the overhead of rust considering all the advantages. Go however... can't even.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Even Haskell is higher on the list than Go, which surprises me a lot

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    WASM would be interesting as well, because lots of stuff can be compiled to it to run on the web

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    Indeed, here's an example - my climate-system model web-app, written in scala running (mainly) in wasm
    (note: that was compiled with scala-js 1.17, they say latest 1.19 does wasm faster, I didn't yet compare).
    [ Edit: note wasm variant only works with most recent browsers, maybe with experimental options set - if not try without ?wasm ]

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I would be interested in how things like MATLAB and octave compare to R and python. But I guess it doesn't matter as much because the relative time of those being run in a data analysis or research context is probably relatively low compared to production code.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Every time I get surprised by the efficiency of Lisp! I guess they mean Common Lisp there, not Clojure or any modern dialect.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Yeah every time I see this chart I think "unless it's performance critical, realtime, or embedded, why would I use anything else?" It's very flexible, a joy to use, amazing interactive shell(s). Paren navigation is awesome. The build/tooling is not the best, but it is manageable.

    That said, OCaml is nice too.

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  • [–] -4 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    I have a hard time believing Java is that high up. I'd place it around c#.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago* (6 children)

    Why?

    (A super slimmed down flavour of) Java runs on fucking simcards.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    And it powers a lot of phones. People generally don't like it when their phone needs to charge all the freaking time.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    I ran Linux with KDE on my phone for a while and it for sure needed EVEN MORE charging all the time even though most of the system is C, with a sprinkle of C++ and QT.

    But that is probably due to other inefficiencies and lack of optimization (which is fine, make it work first, optimize later)

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah, and Android has had some 16 years of "optimize later". I have some very very limited experience with writing mobile apps and while I found it to be a PITA, there is clearly a lot of thought given to how to not eat all the battery and die in the ecosystem there. I would expect that kind of work to also be done at the JVM level.

    If Windows Mobile had succeeded, C# likely would've been lower as well, just because there'd be more incentive to make a battery charge last longer.

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  • [+] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    I'm using the fattest of java (Kotlin) on the fattest of frameworks (Spring boot) and it is still decently fast on a 5 year old raspberry pi. I can hit precise 50 μs timings with it.

    Imagine doing it in fat python (as opposed to micropython) like all the hip kids.

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  • [+] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)
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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    Does the paper take into account the energy required to compile the code, the complexity of debugging and thus the required re-compilations after making small changes? Because IMHO that should all be part of the equation.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    They compile each benchmark solution as needed, following the CLBG guidelines, but they do not measure or report the energy consumed during the compilation step.

    Time to write our own paper with regex and compiler flags.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It's a good question, but I think the amount of time spent compiling a language is going to be pretty tiny compared to the amount of time the application is running.

    Still - "energy efficiency" may be the worst metric to use when choosing a language.

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