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by theandrewbailey 513 days ago
Transmitting data across the internet requires energy, plus JS is JIT/compiled every time it's run. Popular websites load up on JS, so it uses quite a bit.

I was under the impression that Python's serious number crunching ultimately happens in modules written in another language like CUDA. If it couldn't be tied together with Python, it would be in another language.

1 comments

There was a peer-reviewed paper about energy efficiency of programming languages some years ago (see https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/pap...). A JIT seem to have little influence on energy efficiency; there are even big differences between jitted languages; but Python is on the second last place. I have no numbers on what percentage Python itself contributes to the deep learning number crunching; but according to the paper, the overall use of JS could be twenty times higher than that of Python to cause the same energy consumption. Maybe someone has the numbers.