Thought from a good discussion with at François at OSDC today, what is the carbon footprint of various languages? He mentioned that the carbon footprint of a new Haskell compiler release is remarkably non-trivial due to every Haskell package in Debian needing to be rebuilt.

So, I thought, what’s the impact of something like Python? (or Perl). Every machine running the code has to do the bytecode compilation/JIT/interpretation of that code so when, say, Ubuntu ships some new version of $random_desktop_thing_written_in_python, we’re actually compiling it well over 20 million times. That’s a remarkably non-trivial amount of CPU time (and thus CO2 emissions).

So, program in compiled languages such as C or C++ as doing so will save polar bears.