> Why are modern technologies so energy inefficient? First off, framing this as "inefficiency" seems inappropriate because we are not doing comparison of ident

> Why are modern technologies so energy inefficient? First off, framing this as "inefficiency" seems inappropriate because we are not doing comparison of identical things. If the output of each language was identical and one spent less energy than the other to produce it, we could frame it this way successfully. Next, this question isn't unlike asking: "why is my bicycle more efficient than my car?" Well, once again, it's not a 1-1 comparison. The car is doing more work, able to carry more weight further. It is using more energy but it is quite likely more efficient than your bicycle. Plus, it allows you to accomplish things your bike never could. Similarly C is doing the least work (hence seemingly more efficient) while JS is doing the most. Sure not all that work JS is doing is "useful" work but Rust version for example is likely more secure, so it is still "better" and possibly more efficient than the C version. All the work that C is not doing, like checking for buffer overflows, makes it look like it is more efficient but that's not the kind of efficiency we really want. There is real inefficiency in using existing libraries (in any language) rather than tailoring every method to the application at hand. That's an economic trade off as mentioned by others and has nothing to do with energy efficiency