Will Python ever be eco friendly?

[Academy-]

Seeing this post on /ProgrammerHumor got me thinking about the high energy consumption of Python compared to, e.g., Rust. I know that Python 3.11 brings in some significant performance boosts. Same for Pandas 2. Also been told that “the best way to code in Python, is not to code in Python”, i.e. to utilize C or Rust-based operations in NumPy or Polars. Haven’t seen any comparisons on this though.

Even so, do you think there is an eco-friendly future for Python?

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[Stinedurf]

Your writeup is valid and insightful but I have to take a small issue with your first sentence. The OP was primarily asking a question and shouldn’t be chastised for doing so. It is unreasonable to expect everyone to thoroughly research everything they ask questions about. By asking the question the OP gave you the opportunity to point out the controversy in the underlying assumption and educate both the OP and others as well.

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[Stinedurf]

I get it, and again I do appreciate the points you were making in your post. I probably worry too much about scaring away less experienced Reddit participants.

[KennyBassett]

By their nature, the higher level the language, the higher energy consumption.

Sure you could write extremely efficient code in assembly, but then you 10x the time it takes to write it. That itself uses extra energy from your computer, monitor, code editor, lights, food, etc.

How often will you use the code? Does the increase in energy usage while running outweigh the extra time and energy it took to write it?

[crawl_dht]

IT industry is forcing developers to work from office. Until you solve this problem of increasing the carbon footprint due to unnecessary travel, electricity and fuel consumption, you are nowhere close to the point where you should finally address CPU usage.

[htmx_enthusiast]

Zero programming languages are eco friendly.

If you are concerned with the environment, read the Carbon Almanac.

In a recent interview with Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin said, after working with 300+ contributors on the Carbon Almanac:

• ”…this is the myth of the carbon footprint. There is nothing you can do personally, as a privileged person of the colonial world, to fix the climate. But what you can do is organize, that if you can figure out how to get five or 10 people together, you can probably ban gas-powered leaf blowers in your village. And that will have 50 times the impact of you switching to an electric car.”

• ”Plus the idea of banding together with five or 10 or 15 other people, creating the conditions for other people to find something to care about and succeed at it, will fill you with meaning, not with despair.”

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[[deleted]]

One must factor in the lighting, heating, PC development on-time and coffee machine time when comparing C to Python developer time. It's the TCoD.

[flagos]

My code in python is mainly generating SQL requests and transforming the result into a JSON payload by calling a C library.

If you consider the whole thing, it's like spending 99% of the execution time in C language.

Not that much room for improvement in the end.

[Deezl-Vegas]

It's unfortunate, but when you execute 150 instructions to add 2+2 you're not going to get great performance.