← Back to context

Comment by pif

3 years ago

Thank you for your post!

Thank you especially for reminding everybody that programming is much more than web programming and information systems.

15 comments

pif

Reply
quelsolaar  3 years ago

Thank you,

Its also worth remembering that a lot of higher level languages have runtimes / VMs are implemented in C. Web applications rely heavily on databases, java script VM, network-stacks, system calls and operating system features, all of which are impemented in C.

If you are a software developer and want to do something about climate change, consider becomming a compiler engineer. If you manage to get a couple of tenths of a percent performance increase in one of the big compilers during your career, you will have materially impacted global warming. Compiler engineers are the unsung heroes of software engineering.

  • thefaux  3 years ago

    > If you manage to get a couple of tenths of a percent performance increase in one of the big compilers during your career, you will have materially impacted global warming.

    I've heard this kind of claim a number of times and I think it's more complicated than the crude statistical measurement makes it sound. Personally, I think that most programs are not run frequently enough to matter from an emissions perspective. For programs that are, like ML training programs, users will just train more data if the algorithms are faster so most energy efficiencies will get wiped out by the increased usage.

    Even if that theory is wrong, what if there is a language that is 10% better than C for 95% of common C use cases? Wouldn't it be better for compiler engineers to focus on developing that language than micro-optimizing C?

  • ErikCorry  3 years ago

    No JavaScript VM is implemented in C. They are all written in a language that's a bit like C++ but has no exceptions and relies on lots of compiler behaviour that is not defined by the C++ standard.