Revisiting software efficiency, energy consumption, and carbon emissions
Recent research has begun to illuminate the differences in energy efficiency across programming languages, highlighting a crucial aspect of programming that goes beyond mere performance optimization. For instance, two of the most influential research papers on the energy efficiency of programming languages – Energy efficiency across programming languages: how do energy, time, and memory relate? [1] and the follow-up paper Ranking programming languages by energy efficiency [2], by Pereira, R., Couto, M., et al. – have systematically analyzed and ranked programming languages based on their energy consumption, revealing that energy efficiency varies significantly among languages and not always aligned with their execution speed or popularity.
In these research papers, the authors posed several key research questions that helped guide their investigation and served as initial hypotheses. These questions...
