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

["Jeffrey R.Carter" <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.acm.org.not>]

On 2022-02-27 09:05, Robin Vowels wrote:
> On Monday, February 21, 2022 at 9:59:32 AM UTC+11, Jerry wrote:
>> 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
> .
> Has this anything to do with reality?
> .
> What of the design, testing, and maintainability of programs?

There are a couple of obvious problems with this study. First, the same data 
structures, algorithms, and checks for validity of input and so on, in any 
imperative language, should give very similar machine code. Robert Dewar 
famously had a collection of equivalent Ada and C programs that produced 
identical machine code when compiled with gcc. The kind of differences reported 
between C and Ada or C++ shows that they are comparing apples to orangutans.

Second, there are hard data that show that, compared to low-level languages like 
C, Ada requires 1/2 the effort to reach deployment, and 1/40 the effort to 
correct post-deployment errors. The energy consumption for that additional 
effort should swamp the kind of small differences during execution that this 
study concentrates on.

-- 
Jeff Carter
“A key difference between Ada and most other
software development languages is that Ada is
deigned as an engineering tool as well as a
programming tool.”
Ada Distilled
209