Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages

10/18/2017

By Rui Pereira, HASLab, INESC TEC & Minho University.

Abstract. This talk presents a study of the runtime, memory usage and energy consumption of twenty seven well-known software languages. We monitor the performance of such languages using ten different programming problems, expressed in each of the languages. Our results show interesting findings, such as how slower/faster languages consuming less/more energy, and how memory usage influences energy consumption. We also show how to use our results to provide software engineers support to decide which language to use when energy efficiency, time, or memory is a concern.

Keywords. Green Software, Energy Efficiency, Programming Languages, Language Benchmarking.

About the Speaker. Rui Pereira is a fourth-year MAPi PhD student, affiliated with HASLab/INESC TEC & the University of Minho, and working under the supervision of Prof. João Saraiva and Prof. Jácome Cunha. He received his MSc degree in Informatics Engineering in 2013, with the thesis “Querying for Model-Driven Spreadsheets” under the SpreadSheets as a Programming Paradigm (SSaaPP) project. Currently, his areas of research are green computing, source-code analysis and manipulation, and human-computer interaction. For his PhD thesis “Analyzing and Optimizing Abnormal Energy Consumption in Software Systems”, in which he was also awarded an FCT grant for, he focuses on the challenge of both detecting where high energy consumption occurs and understanding how to avoid and optimize this abnormal behaviour. He is also one of the founding members of the Green Software for Space Control Mission (GreenSSCM) project, the Software Repositories for Green Computing FLAD/NSF project, and the Green Software Lab: Green Computing as an Engineering Discipline (GSL) project. Rui won the SBLP’17 Best Paper award, and is the ACM ICSE’17 Student Research Competition Silver winner with the paper titled “Locating Energy Hotspots in Source Code”.