Comment by goku12

4 months ago

There are 3 cases. The first is that you are comfortable with Rust and you just choose it for that. The second is that you're not comfortable with Rust and you choose something else that works for you.

The third is the interesting one. When your service has a lot of traffic and every bit of inefficiency costs you money (node rents) and energy. Rust is an obvious improvement over the interpreted languages. There are also a few rare cases where Rust has enough advantages over Go to choose the former. In general though, I feel that a lot of energy consumption and emissions can be avoided by choosing an appropriate language like Rust and Go.

This would be a strong argument in favor of these languages in the current environmental conditions, if it weren't for 'AI'. Whether it be to train them or run them, they guzzle energy even for problems that could be solved with a search engine. I agree that LLMs can do much more. But I don't think they do enough for the energy they consume.

8 comments

goku12

Reply
palata  4 months ago

> Rust is an obvious improvement over the interpreted languages.

Do we agree that most of the languages I mentioned above are not interpreted languages? You seem to only consider Go as a non-interpreted alternative...

  • goku12  3 months ago

    I replied using my phone and couldn't see your original comment for reference. Yes, your list contains more compiled languages.

    Of those, I'm not very comfortable with using C and C++ for backend development. Their lack of automated memory safety measures is an issue for services that are exposed to the internet. (To be clear, memory safety isn't the only type of safety required). Swift may be a fine choice. (I'm unfamiliar with it.)

    JVM languages like Java, Kotlin and Scala are all compiled languages, but I'm unsure how well they satisfy what I said before. To repeat, what matters is energy efficiency and resource utilization (not speed). I hope that somebody can provide an insight into how much overhead they incur on account of running in a VM.