C Is The Most Environmentally Friendly Programming Language

Communication is very important, and the primary means of communication and interaction known to humans is through language. Just like humans communicate, computers and their systems communicate too. 

Take a closer look at your computer, you’ll realize there’s not much difference. There are quite a number of pieces of software and hardware that require communicating with each other right from the moment you put them on your system. Your application is reacting to the click on your mouse or to a keyboard typing or even the mic when using voice commands and control. The computer system can read files right from your disk storage and so on. At the end of the day, the machine understands nothing but bits, 1s, and 0s, the combination of which creates meaning that you the user desire.

So what is a programming language? A programming language is the set of instructions through which humans interact with computers. In other to write a program, you’ll need codes. Special pieces of software exist that turn the code you input into machine language that the machine understands. The code is are pretty much like writing a paragraph of instruction or creating a to-do list for computers. With these codes and programming, you get the computer to draw complex shapes and create rich computer graphics, and then create programs that understand game mechanics and help you build games that feel real with gravity and particle collision, with these programs you can create the most intense and immersive games of all sorts.

So what programming languages exist? According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey in the year 2018 and in 2020, more than 100,000 developers’ development careers were surveyed. According to the survey, JavaScript earned the most popular programming language, followed by Python, Java, and Ruby. Other popular languages include Kotlin, R, PHP, C, C#, C++, Dart, Swift, MATLAB, Rust, Perl, Scala Now that we have been able to identify some of the programming languages that exist, the next big question is, which programming language is the most environmentally friendly for the climate?.

According to a publication in 2017 titled Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages, Portuguese university researchers discussed an attempt to quantify the energy efficiency of programming languages. They looked at the runtime, memory usage, and energy consumption of twenty-seven well-known programming languages. The focus of this task was to gain an adequate understanding of energy efficiency across various programming languages. Although the task looked simple at first glance it was one that required being precise and the ability to properly compare the energy efficiency across programming languages as well as various comparable implementations with a good representation of different problems/solutions.

These Portuguese researchers followed through thoroughly and used a method called the Computer Language Benchmarks Game (CLBG) as the basis for their evaluations. The CLBG initiative helped the researchers arrive at a significant place that presents a structure that permits the running, testing and comparing implemented solutions for a set of diverse programming problems. The CLBG helped these Portuguese researchers obtain a comparable, representative and extensive set of programs written in many of the most popular and widely used programming languages. 

The outcome of the study revealed that compiled languages are about the fastest and most energy-efficient ones. Compiled languages (programming language whose implementations are typically translators that generate machine code from source code) consumed about 120J to execute the test solutions. While for the virtual machine and interpreted languages (programming languages that require step-by-step executors of source code, where no pre-runtime translation takes place), this value was 576J and 2365J, respectively. 

To understand more detail about this, the binary-trees results were taken to illustrate the point, starting with compiled code. From the graph, we can infer that “compiled languages tend to be the fastest and most energy-efficient ones.” C and C++ languages have proven to be the most efficient and fastest languages. Go came off as the worst language from the compiled languages category. Looking at the binary trees for the VM category, Java or Erlang appeared to be the most efficient but far after the compiled category. The inefficient languages go to interpreted languages like Perl, Lua, or Python, and that’s by some margin.

The Portuguese researchers ranked each language based on various combinations of objectives mixing time, memory, and energy parameters, and at the end of the day programming language “C” has occupied the top spot. This study has revealed the efficiency and the most environmentally friendly programming languages. If you are the type of developer that is really concerned about climate change, make “C” your choice of programming language for the next project. 

According to this Portuguese research in which no other research has countered as at the time of writing this, “C” is by far the greenest programming language. Most people take for granted the fact that a computer program that runs faster or is easier will consume less energy. But this research has proven that might not always be true, as other factors enter into the power consumption equation besides speed. 

Moving on, if you ask around most developers know several programming languages, but take a deep dive into one or two. Learning a programming language and becoming an expert in it has proven to require time, patience and consistency. The type of software you want to develop may also be a consideration that influences which programming languages to learn. While no concrete rules apply for what language is compulsory to write what software, based on reports from developers who have become experts at it, we offer you considerable guidance.

Web-based applications are more likely to be programmed using Python and JavaScript. Large corporations depend on C#, Java to develop their internal applications while their Web applications depend on PHP. Programming for data analytics typically depends on R and MATLAB languages. Embedded devices, such as those in the automotive and healthcare industries, run software written in C, C++, or Rust. Applications that run on the cloud are increasingly written in Go or Scala.  Mobile applications are increasingly written in Swift or Kotlin. As surprising as this discovery of environmentally friendly programming languages may seem to us now, it leaves upcoming and expert developers with one big question, “Will your choice of programming language ever be influenced by energy consumption?”