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by flossly 18 days ago
When I read this I can help but feel the energy inefficiency of the self-admitted [1] "billion dollar mistake" that was adding implicit nulls to the C language (and thereafter many other languages).

A bit broader: I wonder how strong typing can save energy! Maybe it makes compiling more energy consuming, but a bug in production costs a lot more energy than a few extra rounds of compiling.

Very hard to get data on. But would totally change the ranking of proglangs by "efficiency".

1 comments

Exactly. You've expressed what I couldn't find the words to say.

I love C, but the shear amount of CVE and crashes are much worse in terms of global energy usage than if it were safe. I imagine the strongest strong-typing ranking that can be saved would come from Swift, where Rust's compile time would tank its ranking...

It may be that the energy drain of bugs simply eclipses the compile/run overhead of all these languages in nearly all use cases.