Programming languages and energy consumption : a survey

Abstract EN

Programming languages have a powerful role to develop and implement highly effective programs and systems.

energy consumption is becoming a key criterion when choosing programming languages instead of fast execution.

five papers and five popular programming languages (Haskell, Java, c#, JavaScript, and php) were reviewed, to answer whether the fast execution programs are also energy-efficient programs, or not, and if optimizing a program for one of them that affects another one, negatively and positively with considerate the difference between programming languages.

the programming languages were classified into three categories to compare between each language in the same category and compare languages in different categories.

from our study, the result was there is no winner, as no language exceeds the rest in all study cases.

it is clear that different programming languages classes, and even languages within the same class have a completely different impact on energy consumption based on the used data type, the size of the data, the used approach, and other reasons.

also, most energy-efficient languages are not always the fastest.