Save the Earth, Program in C++!

Abstract

Green computing - paying attention to energy consumption of programs - getting more and more important in software construction. When dealing with high performance systems cost factors of energy consumption and cooling are important. When programming small, or embedded devices the battery capacity may be the restriction. Earlier research shows that the C and C++ programming languages are by far the best choices when we decide based on the run time performance / energy consumption ratio. In this presentation we show why C++ acts so well in this arena. We learn language techniques like the move semantics, RAII (resource acquisition is initialization) technique, effective concurrent programming as well as various compiler optimizations to understand how we can maximize performance while minimizing energy consumption of C++ programs.