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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[–] 35 points 1 year ago (58 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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  • [–] 40 points 1 year ago (52 children)
  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (20 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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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (18 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 (3 children)

    Only if you choose a lower language level as the target. Given these results I suspect the researchers had it output JS for something like ES5, meaning a bunch of polyfills for old browsers that they didn't include in the JS-native implementation..

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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 (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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  • [–] 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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  • [–] 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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  • [–] 11 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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  • [–] 5 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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