Re: Comparing languages wrt energy, speed, and memory use

[Fernando Oleo Blanco <irvise_ml@irvise.xyz>]

Hello everybody,

I am going to leave a few comments regarding this paper that I believe
everybody should know. Most if not all of these points are known and
have been discussed pretty much everywhere; but a lot of people still
don't know them or decide to not know.

The programs are taken from the Programming Language Benchmark Game. It
is a really cool place that has been providing relevant performance
data for a lot of languages and comparisons between them.

Here are a few issues:

1. Quite a few languages are not using heavily optimised code. Ada is
   one of them. Some of those programs are written as direct
   translations from other languages from people that did not know the
   target language.
2. Quite a few of those implementations have not been touched in years.
   Some of the improvements that may have taken place in the
   language/compiler/tools may not be taken advantage of. For example,
   the Ada examples are compiled with -gnatNp. Can anybody say what
   that flag does? x)
3. C/C++/Rust program are competing on getting the best results. Other
   languages are lagging behind. For example, Fortran could do much
   better. For a couple of years, the Fortran community has been
   improving the code little by little and they have managed to improve
   their results.
4. There are a few controversies. Some languages are not allowed to use
   higher performance libraries while others are allowed their stl or
   equivalent that do actually use the same tools as those libraries.
   Thre are a few other examples.

As the very Game page says, do not take the benchmark seriously. But
the communities whose languages are on top, they do not care. Ada has
been left behind since very few or nobody is actually taking a look at
the code and optimising it...

We may want to improve some of these tests as a community :)

Here are some relevant links:
- Benchmark game:
https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/
- Source code:
https://salsa.debian.org/benchmarksgame-team/benchmarksgame

Regards,
Fer

Am Sun, 20 Feb 2022 14:59:29 -0800 (PST)
schrieb Jerry <list_email@icloud.com>:

> This paper comparing 27 languages with respect to energy use, speed,
> and memory use is interesting. Of course Ada fares very well.
> 
> https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/sleFinal.pdf
> 
> It is linked from this Slashdot page which I'm sure is full of
> useless chatter.
> 
> https://developers.slashdot.org/story/22/02/20/0143226/is-it-more-energy-efficient-to-program-in-rust
>