What about calculating the environmental impact of the programming language you use? Some of the most popular languages are the least performative (we all know

What about calculating the environmental impact of the programming language you use? Some of the most popular languages are the least performative (we all know which ones). But they make life easier for developers, or as programmers love to say 'more productive'. It's good to see new(ish) languages take performance seriously: Rust, Go, Nim, Crystal, Julia. I don't think it's controversial to say a typed, compiled language gives you good performance for free (and the reduced computing resources that implies). When PHP 7 was released, Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, said the performance improvements meant fewer servers, smaller memory use and reduced CPU activity - all of which equalled less power or electricity consumed. (And remember this is an interpreted language.) You can watch a segment from his presentation below where he talks about this, including the calculations he made of potential CO2 savings: Rasmus Lerdorf – "PHP in 2018" (extract from the 15 min mark): https://youtu.be/umxGUWYmiSw?t=15m16s https://youtu.be/umxGUWYmiSw?t=15m16s When you consider the millions of servers in use, that additional language efficiency adds up to a substantial saving in electricity use. And yet among developers, a common response to performance issues is to say: hardware is cheap, just add another energy-guzzling server or use a more powerful computer. The topic of ranking programming languages by energy efficiency has been discussed before on Hacker News. Here is the paper previously discussed which has been updated in 2021: Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages: https://sites.google.com/view/energy-efficiency-languages https://sites.google.com/view/energy-efficiency-languages