Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages [pdf]
Lisp (Common Lisp) beats all the other dynamic languages by a considerable margin. This is why I am developing Clasp - a Common Lisp implementation based on LLVM that interoperates with C++/C (<a href="https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp.git" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp.git</a>) for scientific programming.<p>With Clasp, we get the best of multiple worlds. We get a dynamic language (Common Lisp) with automatic memory management and enormous expressive power that can directly use powerful C and C++ libraries.  All three of these languages are "long-lived" languages in that code that was written 10 and 20 years ago still works.<p>Performance is really important to me and I have written a lot of code over the past four decades. I won't develop meaningful code in any language that falls below Racket in table 4 because these language implementations are too inefficient. I furthermore want to keep using my code over the years and decades and so I won't develop meaningful code in any language where someone else can break my code by changing the standard. My program "leap" was written 27 years ago in C and it is still being used daily by thousands of computational chemists. But it's really hard to improve leap because the code is brittle largely because of malloc/free-style memory management (brrr). For a compiled, high-performance, standard language with proven lasting power and performance - Common Lisp is the best choice.