Assessing The Energy Efficiency Of Programming Languages

September 10, 2024 by Maya Posch 67 Comments

Programming languages are generally defined as a more human-friendly way to program computers than using raw machine code. Within the realm of these languages there is a wide range of how close the programmer is allowed to get to the bare metal, which ultimately can affect the performance and efficiency of the application. One metric that has become more important over the years is that of energy efficiency, as datacenters keep growing along with their power demand. If picking one programming language over another saves even 1% of a datacenter’s electricity consumption, this could prove to be highly beneficial, assuming it weighs up against all other factors one would consider.

There have been some attempts over the years to put a number on the energy efficiency of specific programming languages, with a paper by Rui Pereira et al. from 2021 (preprint PDF) as published in Science of Computer Programming covering the running a couple of small benchmarks, measuring system power consumption and drawing conclusions based on this. When Hackaday covered the 2017 paper at the time, it was with the expected claim that C is the most efficient programming language, while of course scripting languages like JavaScript, Python and Lua trailed far behind.

With C being effectively high-level assembly code this is probably no surprise, but languages such as C++ and Ada should see no severe performance penalty over C due to their design, which is the part where this particular study begins to fall apart. So what is the truth and can we even capture ‘efficiency’ in a simple ranking?

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Get Thee To Git

September 7, 2024 by Al Williams 21 Comments

While version control used to be reserved for big corporate projects, it is very mainstream these days. You can attribute much of that to Git, the software that has nearly displaced other version control. Git works well, it is versatile, and it scales well. It is easy to use as an individual developer or as part of a worldwide team. But Git is also one of those things that people don’t always study, they just sort of “pick it up” as they go. That motivated [Glasskube] to create “The Guide to Git I Never Had.”

If you are ready to click away because you are not a software person, hang on. Git is actually useful for many different kinds of data, and there are a number of hardware projects that use Git in some form. That’s especially true if the project has some code associated with it, but there are projects that consist of PCBs, reverse engineering documentation, or schematics.

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A Windows Control Panel Retrospective Amidst A Concerning UX Shift

September 3, 2024 by Maya Posch 153 Comments

Once the nerve center of Windows operating systems, the Control Panel and its multitude of applets has its roots in the earliest versions of Windows. From here users could use these configuration applets to control and adjust just about anything in a friendly graphical environment. Despite the lack of any significant criticism from users and with many generations having grown up with its familiar dialogs, it has over the past years been gradually phased out by the monolithic Universal Windows Platform (UWP) based Settings app.

Whereas the Windows control panel features an overview of the various applets – each of which uses Win32 GUI elements like tabs to organize settings – the Settings app is more Web-like, with lots of touch-friendly whitespace, a single navigable menu, kilometers of settings to scroll through and absolutely no way to keep more than one view open at the same time.

Unsurprisingly, this change has not been met with a lot of enthusiasm by the average Windows user, and with Microsoft now officially recommending users migrate over to the Settings app, it seems that before long we may have to say farewell to what used to be an intrinsic part of the Windows operating system since its first iterations. Yet bizarrely, much of the Control Panel functionality doesn’t exist yet in the Settings app, and it remain an open question how much of it can be translated into the Settings app user experience (UX) paradigm at all.

Considering how unusual this kind of control panel used to be beyond quaint touch-centric platforms like Android and iOS, what is Microsoft’s goal here? Have discovered a UX secret that has eluded every other OS developer?

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Putting A Pi In A Container

August 30, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 16 Comments

Docker and other containerization applications have changed a lot about the way that developers create new software as well as how they maintain virtual machines. Not only does containerization reduce the system resources needed for something that might otherwise be done in a virtual machine, but it standardizes the development environment for software and dramatically reduces the complexity of deploying on different computers. There are some other tricks up the sleeves as well, and this project called PI-CI uses Docker to containerize an entire Raspberry Pi.

The Pi container emulates an entire Raspberry Pi from the ground up, allowing anyone that wants to deploy software on one to test it out without needing to do so on actual hardware. All of the configuration can be done from inside the container. When all the setup is completed and the desired software installed in the container, the container can be converted to an .img file that can be put on a microSD card and installed on real hardware, with support for the Pi models 3, 4, and 5. There’s also support for using Ansible, a Docker automation system that makes administering a cluster or array of computers easier.

Docker can be an incredibly powerful tool for developing and deploying software, and tools like this can make the process as straightforward as possible. It does have a bit of a learning curve, though, since sharing operating system tools instead of virtualizing hardware can take a bit of time to wrap one’s mind around. If you’re new to the game take a look at this guide to setting up your first Docker container.

A Modern Take On An Old Language

August 16, 2024 by Al Williams 44 Comments

Some old computer languages are destined to never die. They do, however, evolve. For example, Fortran, among the oldest of computer languages, still has adherents, not to mention a ton of legacy code to maintain. But it doesn’t force you to pretend you are using punched cards anymore. In the 1970s, if you wanted to crunch numbers, Fortran was a good choice. But there was another very peculiar language: APL. Turns out, APL is alive and well and has a thriving community that still uses it.

APL has a lot going for it if you are crunching serious numbers. The main data type is a multidimensional array. In fact, you could argue that a lot of “modern” ideas like a REPL, list types, and even functional programming entered the mainstream through APL. But it did have one strange thing that made it difficult to use and learn.

[Kenneth E. Iverson] was at Harvard in 1957 and started working out a mathematical notation for dealing with arrays. By 1960, he’d moved to IBM and a few years later wrote a book entitled “A Programming Language.” That’s where the name comes from — it is actually an acronym for the book’s title. Being a mathematician, [Iverson] used symbols instead of words. For example, to create an array with the numbers 1 to 5 in it and then print it, you’d write:

⎕←⍳5

Since modern APL has a REPL (read-eval-print loop), you could remove the box and the arrow today.

What Key Was That?

Wait. Where are all those keys on your keyboard? Ah, you’ve discovered the one strange thing. In 1963, CRTs were not very common. While punched cards were king, IBM also had a number of Selectric terminals. These were essentially computer-controlled typewriters that had type balls instead of bars that were easy to replace.

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Robust Speech-to-Text, Running Locally On Quest VR Headset

August 16, 2024 by Donald Papp 3 Comments

[saurabhchalke] recently released whisper.unity, a Unity package that implements whisper locally on the Meta Quest 3 VR headset, bringing nearly real-time transcription of natural speech to the device in an easy-to-use way.

Whisper is a robust and free open source neural network capable of quickly recognizing and transcribing multilingual natural speech with nearly-human level accuracy, and this package implements it entirely on-device, meaning it runs locally and doesn’t interact with any remote service.

It used to be that voice input for projects was a tricky business with iffy results and a strong reliance on speaker training and wake-words, but that’s no longer the case. Reliable and nearly real-time speech recognition is something that’s easily within the average hacker’s reach nowadays.

We covered Whisper getting a plain C/C++ implementation which opened the door to running on a variety of platforms and devices. [Macoron] turned whisper.cpp into a Unity binding which served as inspiration for this project, in which [saurabhchalke] turned it into a Quest 3 package. So if you are doing any VR projects in Unity and want reliable speech input with a side order of easy translation, it’s never been simpler.

Programming Ada: Implementing The Lock-Free Ring Buffer

August 1, 2024 by Maya Posch 20 Comments

In the previous article we looked at designing a lock-free ring buffer (LFRB) in Ada, contrasting and comparing it with the C++-based version which it is based on, and highlighting the Ada way of doing things. In this article we’ll cover implementing the LFRB, including the data request task that the LFRB will be using to fill the buffer with. Accompanying the LFRB is a test driver, which will allow us to not only demonstrate the usage of the LFRB, but also to verify the correctness of the code.

This test driver is uncomplicated: in the main task it sets up the LFRB with a 20 byte buffer, after which it begins to read 8 byte sections. This will trigger the LFRB to begin requesting data from the data request task, with this data request task setting an end-of-file (EoF) state after writing 100 bytes. The main task will keep reading 8-byte chunks until the LFRB is empty. It will also compare the read byte values with the expected value, being the value range of 0 to 99.

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