It appears to consume over 17x more power than JavaScript, 40x more power than Java or 75x more than C/Rust. The only language which performed worse than it in terms of pure power consumption was Perl.
While I'm sure these results aren't exactly indicative of day-to-day usage as they're based off of benchmarks which are not exactly representative of day to day use cases it nevertheless raises the question of whether Python is an appropriate choice of language where the application itself is likely to see a high level of total use. I suspect the answer is "more work needs to be done" on the subject to truly assess the impact and a big part of the answer is "depends on how you're using it". It'd be good to see some standardised tests of web frameworks. For instance, load testing a standardised server side version of the TodoMVC project to determine what happens for each framework there, along with what happens when you stick a cache in front of them and so on.
It'd also be interesting to attempt to estimate how much power consumption and hence CO2 generation each given programming language is responsible for given their marketshare and typical usage profiles - although I suspect in practice this would be quite difficult given the diverse usage profiles of modern programming languages. And obviously the fact that machine learning libraries, for instance, will naturally be quite energy intensive - it's probably the case that Python actually does quite well there because most of its popular libraries for that are just wrapping C or similar rather than being pure Python code.
Given the success of V8 and PHP7 in terms of boosting the performance and presumably energy efficiency profile of their respective languages it'd be nice to see the mainline CPython interpreter undertaking a similar kind of transformation. Obviously we have things like PyPy but it seems to me the Python community needs to be united around a solution to this which forks simply are not going to be able to drive.
It appears to consume over 17x more power than JavaScript, 40x more power than Java or 75x more than C/Rust. The only language which performed worse than it in terms of pure power consumption was Perl.
While I'm sure these results aren't exactly indicative of day-to-day usage as they're based off of benchmarks which are not exactly representative of day to day use cases it nevertheless raises the question of whether Python is an appropriate choice of language where the application itself is likely to see a high level of total use. I suspect the answer is "more work needs to be done" on the subject to truly assess the impact and a big part of the answer is "depends on how you're using it". It'd be good to see some standardised tests of web frameworks. For instance, load testing a standardised server side version of the TodoMVC project to determine what happens for each framework there, along with what happens when you stick a cache in front of them and so on.
It'd also be interesting to attempt to estimate how much power consumption and hence CO2 generation each given programming language is responsible for given their marketshare and typical usage profiles - although I suspect in practice this would be quite difficult given the diverse usage profiles of modern programming languages. And obviously the fact that machine learning libraries, for instance, will naturally be quite energy intensive - it's probably the case that Python actually does quite well there because most of its popular libraries for that are just wrapping C or similar rather than being pure Python code.
Given the success of V8 and PHP7 in terms of boosting the performance and presumably energy efficiency profile of their respective languages it'd be nice to see the mainline CPython interpreter undertaking a similar kind of transformation. Obviously we have things like PyPy but it seems to me the Python community needs to be united around a solution to this which forks simply are not going to be able to drive.