The article “Towards a Green Ranking for Programming Languages”, authored by HASLab/INESC TEC & UMinho researchers Marco Couto, Rui Pereira, Francisco Ribeiro, Rui Rua and João Saraiva, was awarded the Best Paper Award at SBLP 2017.

In this work, the researchers analysed and compared the energy efficiency of various programming languages. More specifically, this award-winning research used a set of benchmarking programs and problems in 10 different programming languages in order to compare the energy efficiency of each. In a second phase, the execution time data of the programs was collected, in order to try to understand the relation between energy consumption and execution time.

Finally, while the obtained results showed that the C language is, unsurprisingly, the most efficient language in terms of both energy consumption and performance, the study also showed languages which are slower than others yet consume less energy. It should be noted that execution time and energy consumption vary in different and not directly related ways, since some languages are more efficient in some cases and less in others. Therefore, this study will allow not only the optimisation of energy consumption, but also the optimisation of the execution time of each program.

The 21st Brazilian Symposium on Programming Languages (SBLP 2017) took place on the 21st and 22nd of September, in Fortaleza, Brazil, and is one of the conferences that compose the Brazilian Conference on Software (CBSOFT).