3 ms·

So, the Steve Jobs rumor about only allowing compiled programs on the original iphone was right? There is about a 4x energy increase going to a VM'ed language a

So, the Steve Jobs rumor about only allowing compiled programs on the original iphone was right? There is about a 4x energy increase going to a VM'ed language and about a 19x going to a fully interpreted one over using a natively compiled language. So, the energy efficiency is actually worse than the perf loss in general.

gameswithgo 6y ago
Doesn't just save battery but leads to more responsive interface, which people noticed.
fauigerzigerk 6y ago
>There is about a 4x energy increase going to a VM'ed language That's not what this data shows. Java is at 1.98x, ahead of Swift (2.79x), Pascal (2.14x) and Fortran (2.52x).
- StillBored 6y ago
  Look in the summary section where they provide overall perf per class. As you point out some languages are better than others within the class. But your comparing the best in one class with some of the worst in others. That is disingenuous, I might buy comparing the best in each class, but the results are much the same as the overall.
  - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
    I am comparing with the best in class of non-VM languages (C). That's what all the multiples mean. What Java shows (and a comparison of averages per class wouldn't show) is that there is not necessarily a 4x decrease in efficiency as a result of using a VM. It depends on the implementation. And there are quite a few other VM languages that are doing far better than 4x. Swift clearly demonstrates that native AOT compilation is no guarantee for efficiency. Swift may well have become faster since this study was run (same goes for other languages), but using reference counting for garbage collection will make it very hard to catch up to the best.